Tell me about your work

Short version

What: ~20-30 min casual chat about your work — what a typical week looks like, where time goes, what’s tedious, whether AI has changed any of it.
Why: AI ended my coding books, and I’m trying to figure out what problems are worth working on next — especially now, when a lot of them are newly solvable.
Next: if you’re up for it (I’d really appreciate it!) schedule a time, or reach out and we’ll figure out what works.

Context

From 2019-2026 I wrote books teaching coding and data science via sports, plus one on AI coding tools.

These did well, and let me work for myself. I think a big reason they worked is because I was basically writing to myself, minus ~5 years. The ‘problem’ I was solving:

“I didn’t major in programming, but by playing with this football/ baseball/ basketball data on my own, I’ve realized it’s pretty fun — where do I go from here?”

It turned out to be a common one, especially among non CS major sport fans in their 20s and 30s. This was a good problem to solve, up until ~2025, when AI basically ended coding by hand.

Since then, I’ve continued to solve my own problems — and I’m pretty good at it — but they’ve gotten less universal and/or more crowded.

I’m still confident in my ability to solve problems (especially now that AI has changed the calculus on what’s worth building). But I’m missing perspective on good/valuable problems to solve.

What I’ll ask about

I don’t have a pitch or standard format. A 20-30 minute phone call, zoom, coffee, lunch, etc works. Whatever is easiest for you.

You don’t need to prep, but if you want to think about something beforehand:

“a surprising amount of my time is spent on X”

There’s this old data science meme showing 15 different ways people spell “philadelphia” in a dataset. “hey kid, want to be a data scientist? how does cleaning this up for 3 hours a day sound?”

I’m very interested in your version of this; unglamorous stuff that doesn’t make it into the job description. In general, specific stories are good. Also useful:

what does a typical day/week actually look like?
anything you do by hand, copy-paste, or keep in a spreadsheet?
anything you put off because it’s tedious?
anything you (or your team/company) pay money for?
- software, services, a freelancer/contractor/assistant
- esp anything you’re paying for but kind of lukewarm on

I’m also interested in AI. It’s putting a lot of stuff in flux, so seems extra relevant now.

have you tried using it for anything at work? how’d it go?
what worked, what didn’t, where you gave up
fine if the answer is “haven’t really” — that’s useful too

What happens after we talk

Most likely, nothing directly. I’m very early in the process and these are mostly about getting data. This conversation is best viewed as a favor to me (which I’m thankful for!) as I try to expand my surface area and exposure to other industries.

If something does come up where I could be helpful (a tool, consulting, etc), I’ll tell you, but no expectation either way.

I won’t share any specifics or names of what we talk about without asking.

If you know someone with an interesting job (or an annoying part of one) who might be up for a similar conversation, I’d really appreciate an intro too.

Cheers!

Nate