Meet Christopher Kusha - Data Analyst

The Talent Pipeline | Issue: 1.2 | Editor: Scott Certain | 20230918.1

"The Talent Pipeline" continues to gear up for a daily publication schedule as "The Pipeliners Network" gains more interest.

Today, we get to meet Christopher Kusha.

Christopher's background is fascinating. Having gotten to know him in a training environment, reading his introductory article paints a picture that explains why I always enjoyed conversing with him.

So, here's Christopher Kusha.

Hello, I'm Christopher Kusha, a data analyst from Staten Island, New York.

Background

My journey into the tech world started with me studying mathematics.?

While I dabbled in a little C++ and MATLAB as part of my coursework, my path initially was to become an educator. I had also been interested in games as a hobby and became interested in poker. I started from the bottom at the time playing online for nickels and dimes, while learning more about the game, meanwhile, I was teaching at my college.?

This is where I got sucked into the world of data-driven decision-making.?

There was a popular tool for online players that would gather data from your play, as well as your opponents, and could be queried to discover insights (this ran on PostgreSQL, but I had no idea what that was at the time). I used the data I gathered to adjust and learn what my peers were doing better, and ultimately got to the level where I was competing against high-level players across the country.

A combination of advanced solvers on the market making edges a lot harder to maintain, and the pandemic making live play difficult, I decided it was the right time to pivot into a more stable career. I've always been a problem solver and someone who uses data to make informed and optimized decisions, so jumping into data analysis seemed like a natural choice to make.

What excites you the most about being a data analyst?

The most exciting part of being a data analyst for me is solving problems and tuning processes to provide better value. I love to learn and get better at whatever I do, and data is no different.

Skills/Experience

While I primarily consider myself a data analyst, my skillset continues to adapt to what is needed.?

My strongest technical proficiencies are in SQL (SQL server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL), Excel, PowerBI, Tableau, and Python.?

With Python, I am experienced in using common data analysis libraries like Pandas, Matplotlib, Seaborn, Plotly, and NumPy. I have also used Beautiful Soup for web scraping, Tkinter to develop simple GUIs, SQLAlchemy for integration with SQL and Dash. I also have some exposure to using sklearn to train machine learning models.?

For data engineering, I have used PySpark and the Azure suite of tools including Databricks, Data Lake, and Data Factory to create and maintain a data pipeline of daily crime data coming from an external API into SQL databases.

On the non-technical side of things, my background as a professor helps me be a more effective learner capable of picking up new skills and domain knowledge quickly. It has also given me plenty of experience in communicating in simple terms to non-technical audiences when needed. What good are insights if you can't convey them clearly, right?

So, how could something like poker help with data analysis?

Poker is a game of incomplete information.?

This leads to a lot of tricky decision-making. When we know nothing, there is foundational theory to go by, but once we have data and history with opponents, we can make much better decisions by determining what mistakes they are making and changing our own strategy to take advantage.?

Beyond the data, you're making important decisions with financial implications on a regular basis. Being able to keep calm under pressure and be comfortable in the chaos is an asset to have on a team.

Challenges

Challenges come up all the time in programming.?

For small ones, I find both writing clean code and testing often can help pinpoint bugs that pop up. I also try my best to understand the reasoning behind the error messages to better diagnose what is going wrong.

For larger problems, I think knowing when to bring in other people can save a lot of time and pain. I was working on research where our team was to gather crime data from a city website, clean it, transfer it into an SQL database, analyze it, deploy some machine learning models, and present our findings to stakeholders.?

No one on the team really felt comfortable with the engineer role at the time, so I stepped up and took on that myself.

I got to work connecting to the city's API, pulling the data with PySpark, and creating a pipeline for the analysts to work with. I had scheduled the pipeline to run every 6 hours at first just to test that it was working before just running it once a day.?

While it worked, I noticed it took a LONG time. Hours to add less than 1000 new records. After unsuccessfully diagnosing the source of the problem myself, I tried to see if the team had any ideas, but no luck there either.?

Through a combination of working with my superiors and studying some of the documentation, we were able to discern that we were sub-optimally checking our existing database for duplicate records, and PySpark didn't handle that too well.?

We ended up finding a better way to not check against the entire database, but only against a subsection of it, since the entries are all chronological, we just need to make sure something we requested today we didn't already have from yesterday. This ended up taking the run time from 5 hours to as low as 90 seconds, or 99.5% faster for those that like metrics.

Goals

Something that always bothered me a bit about being a professional poker player was feeling like I wasn't contributing value to the world overall. You could make the argument that I'm providing entertainment value and being fun to be around, but it just doesn't feel like enough.?

I would ideally like the work I do to make an impact and help others.?

The best part of being a teacher was seeing the students go from hating math to eventually being like "I get this, it's starting to make sense". While I'm confident I can thrive in many environments, I would like to be involved in education, gaming, music or finance.

Bonus Round

One more layer to me is that I'm an avid musician, I love both writing and performing.?

While my weapon of choice is the drums, I know my way around the piano and guitar enough to help with writing and know a good chunk of theory.?

Music is another avenue of problem-solving; creating a motif or musical idea that drives a song, and figuring out what melodies, harmonies, and rhythms to supplement it with that both sounds pleasing and interesting.

In conclusion, I provide a unique mix of experience with my background, the ability to adapt well and pick up skills quickly. I work well in teams or on my own. If you're interested in working with me, you can find me at

LinkedIn: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/christopher-kusha/

Email: [email protected]

Portfolio: https://github.com/CMatador

That's all I've got, thanks for reading!

Credits:

Photo by Micha? Parzuchowski on Unsplash

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