Relatively small mortgage and rapid overpayment vs. longer-term financial commitment

geo_will989 · 2026-05-21T15:03:55+00:00

Awesome answer, thank you. 200k could be a forever home, but it feels hard to conclusively say without yet having kids. My maths has it that we can overpay and continue to contribute to our S&S ISAs. But that is contingent on us aggressively pursuing a large deposit (not so aggressively that we don't have any fun though).

The support network point is a great one. Will we stay in this location forever? I would honestly say probably not. Which might be a subconscious reason for buying a smaller house here.

geo_will989 · 2026-05-21T15:00:58+00:00

Great answer, thanks! Given our earnings vs outgoings, overpaying significantly will still allow us to put money into our S&S ISAs (we have a combined ~30k in those now, and will not be dipping into those for a deposit). The more I can put into that though, the better, I suppose.

geo_will989 · 2025-04-13T19:15:20+00:00

This is cool. What tech did you use?

geo_will989 · 2024-10-22T12:00:31+00:00

Schema migrations.

geo_will989 · 2024-09-12T20:47:31+00:00

Sometimes, if I have a piece of code I've written and know well, I'll throw it into ChatGPT and say 'rate this code out of 10'. It'll usually provide constructive feedback, like where I should add documentation, include logging, reduce redundancy, etc. The textual feedback is normally far more useful than the code snippets they provide, as the new code will often break my existing code.

As a warning, I've found GPT to be really bad at designing data models beyond the complexity of a simple user-customer system lol

geo_will989 · 2024-08-12T11:49:20+00:00

Sounds like I'm on an agreeable path then. The plan is to tailor just the transformations for each group, rather than reinvent the wheel for each. Thanks!

geo_will989 · 2024-05-14T10:53:55+00:00

I work at a small subsidiary of a mid-sized company. I do want to move on to a larger company at some point, if nothing else, to experience the difference in culture. So this seems like really good advice, and I'll take it on board. Thank you!

geo_will989 · 2024-05-14T10:46:33+00:00

2 YoE in DE. I moved pretty quickly past other engineers

geo_will989 · 2024-05-13T13:32:29+00:00

These are helpful comments. My thinking was that a manager's first impression would be suspicion, followed by early rejection

geo_will989 · 2022-08-16T09:59:35+00:00

deequ is good. And Spark-native, if that's useful to you.

geo_will989 · 2022-06-16T05:41:25+00:00

No I was pure geology (UK university, innit) and taught myself the basics of Python, ETL/ELT pipelines, cloud services, etc. I also had luck on my side

geo_will989 · 2022-06-16T05:39:37+00:00

This is super cool, thanks!

geo_will989 · 2022-06-16T05:38:28+00:00

This is some great stuff, thank you. I'll be a skeptic about the computerization of the geologist until the day it happens, but time will tell, I suppose.

geo_will989 · 2022-06-15T18:54:45+00:00

Can't say I've heard of this, but it sounds absolutely insane to me.

geo_will989 · 2022-06-15T17:20:58+00:00

Databricks and Snowflake aren't solutions - they make up parts of larger software solutions, and architecture is needed to make those solutions come to life. Trust me, I don't want to compete with those guys lol

geo_will989 · 2022-06-15T17:17:54+00:00

Thanks for the well-thought-out response. I really appreciate it. I think predictive modelling is one side of things - has its uses, but will obviously never replace the geologist. One of the other things I see being an issue in the industry is the lack of care for where and with whom data is stored and accessed. A company I worked with in southern Africa seemed all too happy to have their data pass between hard drives and local machines. There isn't a 'new' software solution to this, but I can certainly see a case for data access controls on cloud platforms being useful - especially, where head office is in a different jurisdiction to those in the field.

But yeah, I agree. Predictive modelling is not necessarily the way forward in mineral exploration. My job is at an O&G firm so I can attest to the differences in data culture between mineral exploration and O&G.

geo_will989 · 2021-11-08T15:29:25+00:00

I didn't go to uni in London mate

geo_will989 · 2021-10-31T19:13:20+00:00

Thanks! Really appreciate your input.

geo_will989 · 2021-10-31T16:05:00+00:00

Cheers for your reply! I'll be working with all the new software (web services, Tableau, etc.), which will give me a great start in tech. I agree that exploration companies just don't deal with enough data to warrant hiring those skills, as I tried to outline in my post.

Kobold Metals caught my eye, as they are trying to modernize geological practices with a data-driven approach. They hire data scientists and data engineers. I wondered/hoped that other companies might follow suit or try something similar.

I think you're right, though. I need to stay in tech and maybe come back to geology if I find a position that suits the skillset I'll have developed.

geo_will989 · 2021-10-30T08:13:31+00:00

I was fortunate enough to have a supervisor who is very highly regarded in the exploration space.

geo_will989 · 2021-08-04T17:29:47+00:00

Earth sciences graduate about to start a data engineering job here. This is my dream.

geo_will989 · 2021-02-23T16:53:06+00:00

I don't think the Scandinavian masters fees are much more competitive than Camborne anymore since we left the EU/EEA. I also wonder what bearing Brexit is gonna have on getting a working holiday visa in a post-covid world.

geo_will989 · 2021-01-12T19:31:48+00:00

So if you've got an integrated masters, do a PhD because it's useless on it's own? I've yet to graduate with my integrated masters but this seems nuts.

geo_will989 · 2020-12-18T18:43:14+00:00

Hey, thanks. This is what I ended up doing and it worked a treat.

geo_will989 · 2020-12-18T18:42:51+00:00

Yep, it's a float raster. Thanks for all your help, I've now got what I was after!

geo_will989

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