Eric J Ma's Website

Python has a batteries-included philosophy. This means that when you install Python, you get a lot of basic functionality thrown in for free! Yet, as time progressed, we (the Python language community) gradually figured out how to accomplish that same functionality with fewer lines of code. In other words, we built opinionated tools to streamline common ways of doing things. In this blog post, I'd like to highlight some of these tools, both big and small, and the built-in modules (or otherwise patterns of usage) that they replace.

I will be at ODSC East 2022 teaching Network Analysis Made Simple. We will learn more cool stuff about graphs, their key underlying concepts, and awesome connections to other topics through this tutorial. Hope to see you there! Meanwhile, here's a blog post for your edutainment!

I'm of the opinion that for most data science code, it makes more sense to write functions than objects. This probably isn't controversion, but if you're curious why, then this blog post explains my thought process.

How treating data science projects like software development projects (plus more) helps you be maximally effective.

I recently figured out two tips to make GitHub actions play nicely with conda installations. Here they are.

I've been involved in quite a few rounds of hiring. I've also seen a lot of LinkedIn posts by junior data scientists complaining about the state of the job market. In this post, I'd like to provide personal reflections on the hiring process that I've experienced written from the perspective of someone participating in the hiring team.

I've been asked some questions about my career trajectory, and thanks to a call with Zarrar Shezad, I finally decided to pen down my answers to career trajectory questions.

This is a blog post I've been wanting to put out for a while. It's about a really cool paper that I had the privilege of working on with colleagues at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR). If you have institutional access, you can read the paper online. Here is my layman's summary of the paper.

Moderna's DSAI team, the team I'm on, is hiring! Read on to get links to the postings and get a glimpse into the inner workings of my head as I look through resumes.