I’m Sam, the founder & CEO of Bright Nights Social (formerly Third Place Bar), an alcohol-free nightlife platform in New York City. I’ve been hosting events and writing about non-alcoholic topics since 2022.
I’m also a “DATA PERSON”, although I do less of that these days. I’ve previously worked at data-centric startups doing things like healthcare data analysis and building an open source data quality framework. I also do a lot of conference talks and workshops around data, Python, Postgres, and general data things.
This blog is a merger of several personal and technical blogs I’ve maintained in the past since my Manchester days in the late 2000s, so you’ll come across a pretty random mix of technical posts and personal ramblings about my travels and my time in Manchester, UK. Enjoy 🙂
So… it’s been almost exactly 8 months since everything started shutting down in NYC due to covid-19 (and, well, it’s been a clusterfuck of a year but let’s not talk about that right now ok). As so many people, I spent my time in lockdown learning new things – I did a lot of yoga, mastered a handstand, did macrame, way too much tie-dye (anyone need tie-dye baby onesies? HMU.) and well, I taught myself how to use Garage Band and recorded a few songs.
My quarantine inspired album (ok, it’s only 3 songs so far) “iso trap” (from isolation and the music style trap but also a word play on being trapped at home, get it?) combines two of my passions: music, and comedy. In fact, it combines two wonderful things into what I consider to be one of the lowest possible art forms: musical comedy. Don’t even try and argue. Musical comedy is great because it’s just straight up bad. No one, not a single person, ever said “oh man that was an awesome song” when listening to, dunno, Flight of the Conchords. It’s just about tolerable as far as music goes, and the humor is more witty than actually funny, but somehow it’s strangely appealing nonetheless. Musical comedy is the Taco Bell of art. It’s bad and we all know that, but when it’s good, it slaps.
Anyway, here are several songs I wrote, arranged, and recorded. Two of these were performed at my friend Soheil’s virtual variety show “The Cat’s Throne Zoom”, the third one in my kitchen with no audience. Enjoy.
“Everything is canceled”: A song about everything being canceled. Inspired by the Lego Movie. Includes a dubstep breaking and bad white girl rapping.
“You’re not essential”: A love song / PSA about picking the right person for your quarantine bubble, or maybe waiting until Phase 4 reopening to engage. Inspired by a song we all know and love.
“Second lockdown”: Yup, we messed up. A song about starting from square one. A straight up cover of “Closer” by the Chainsmokers using the instrumental, planning to do my own arrangement of this too and maybe get a second person to be the Halsey to my chainsmoker.
While I usually publish less personal posts on here, I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot since I started to learn snowboarding and skateboarding a couple of years ago – in my early 30s, which has been not just a physically painful experience, but also stirred up a lot of emotions about my own sense of worth.
I’m not an expert in anything. I’ve never learned to play an instrument. I enjoy exercise and sports, but I’m far from actually being good at anything. I’m fluent in my second language (English), but will probably never be at the level of a native speaker, and I’ve been struggling to reach any kind of fluency in Spanish for over a year. I did well (not amazing) in school and in my PhD, I’m decent at my job, and (luckily) I’ve always had the chance to work with plenty of people who are significantly smarter than I am. In short, I’m just kind of… okay at things. Good enough where necessary to not be a burden to others (like my job, organizing events, public speaking and teaching), and somewhere between pretty bad and decent at everything else.
And I’ve resented myself and my parents for that pretty much my entire life. While some of my friends joined sports teams or started taking music classes at an early age, learning a skill that would last them their whole life, I sat at home, watching TV, and eating top ramen. Others appeared to have an interest and internal drive to learn and excel at their chosen hobbies at an early age, as well as the determination and ambition to stick with it through years of hard training, competition, failures, and successes. Meanwhile, I became addicted to online chat rooms at age 13 and didn’t leave my computer for years, racking up enormous phone bills until we finally switched to a flat rate.
A lot of this is my own fault – I had the chance to speak up and ask my parents to enroll me in a class or club at any point during my childhood. But I almost never did, and the one attempt I made at taking piano lessons at age 12 (copying a friend of mine from school) failed after several months because I preferred to take afternoon naps rather than go to class. Some of this might be due to my parents leaving me to figure things out by myself at an early age, emphasis on “by myself”, and the lack of support from any adult who might have had a more long-term view of the benefits of extra-curricular activities. Besides, US schools put a lot more emphasis on extra-curricular activities than German schools (or from what I know, any European country for that matter), with scholarships being an important factor in gaining entry to college education, so any activity outside of class is usually driven by parents who did the research required to find the right clubs and lessons for their kids.
Whatever the reason, I have been struggling with my mediocrity my entire life, but ironically also never attempted to actually rectify this and put in the work required to become an expert at something – at any point, I figured it was already too late anyway. Now, at 34, I’m a decent software engineer (thanks to the internet and wonderful smart and patient coworkers) who can play a handful of songs on the harmonica, ride up and down small ramps on a skateboard, survive blue runs on a snowboard, do a few yoga poses, bake a nice cake, get a couple of laughs when doing standup, and communicate in mostly broken Spanish (old people usually find that charming though, so I guess that’s a win). I’m not great at any of these things – I’m the textbook definition of “okay”. On the other hand, my partner is a software engineer and multi-talented musician who plays and performs in several bands, has been skateboarding for decades, and knows how to ride and maintain a motorcycle, just for good measure. And I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t pain me to face my own ineptitude every time I see him perform on stage, land a seemingly impossible trick at the skate park (first try!) or bomb black runs on a snowboard.
So. Where do I go from here? Should I stop doing the things I enjoy because the chances of me becoming an expert are fairly low, given that I’ve never shown any sort of stamina and determination when it comes to learning anything outside of what’s required for my job (I have a strong sense of duty that seems to kick me into overdrive mode when needed)? Should I work hard to finally change my personality that’s been shaped by 34 years of mediocrity, self-loathing, and abandoned plans to become a better person? Throw money at the problem and pay someone to coach me? And once I’ve achieved expertise in something, will I be able to lead a happier and more fulfilled life? Why do I even believe that it’s so important for me to become an expert at something? Do I want to get better because it’s the only way I’m able to enjoy something or because it enables me to do even more enjoyable things, or do I want to achieve expertise because expertise is highly valued in society, and I crave the attention and praise that might follow from it? Why do we value expertise so highly for interests like arts and sports that have little actual impact on other people’s lives? (I’m not talking about professions that require expertise to ensure safety and wellbeing of others – being a mediocre pilot or doctor is not exactly an option.) Why the hell am I beating myself up over this so much when I don’t even know what I’m doing this for, other than my own enjoyment?
Interestingly, while writing this post I did a quick Google search on “is it okay to be mediocre”. Most results told me “NO” – it’s a sign of laziness, you should strive for greatness, no one is average – everyone is special! and so on, and so forth. And then I found a post from Mark Manson, author of “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” which I actually read about a year ago. In his post “In defense of being average”, he writes:
It’s my belief that this flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that “exceptional” is the new normal. And since all of us are rarely exceptional, we all feel pretty damn insecure and desperate to feel “exceptional” all the time.
A lot of this might be obvious to others, but things only just clicked for me here:
Praise and recognition are a wonderful result of doing something, but most of what I do voluntarily is already enjoyable, even if I will never receive any compliments or applause for it. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it. Or maybe shouldn’t be doing it.
I also realized that one of the reasons why society values expertise so highly is because it makes your skills valuable to others – they can benefit from it, whether it’s you working for them, or providing entertainment of sorts. Just about average performance isn’t worth anything to others. Especially in tech, we’re constantly looking for rockstars and ninjas and superheroes – people who are exceptional at their job, devaluing everyone who is good but not amazing.
Mastery may open up new opportunities – maybe a black run really is disproportionately more fun to ride a snowboard on than a blue run – but for me, even easy runs are still fun and challenging. Even if I don’t practice and train at the level to become an expert, if I keep doing as much as feels right, I’ll most likely make a little bit of progress eventually and get to try out something new. Or I might not. Maybe I’ll keep doing the same blue runs over and over without ever getting any better, and eventually give up on snowboarding because it’s getting boring. And that’s… also okay?
A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept being mediocre, then they’ll never achieve anything, never improve, and that their life doesn’t matter.
(Mark Manson again)
While I still wish I had invested more time and effort into mastering something earlier in my life, I should probably just accept that I can’t go back, and at the same time, that mastery might not even be the right goal for me. I’m not an expert in anything. If you say “you still have time to become one”, trust me, I won’t be, I’m not the kind of person who will. But I’m neither a pilot, nor a doctor, and I’m both confident enough in my job skills and aware enough of my deficiencies to consider myself competent, employable, and not a risk to others. Whether I’m just mediocre at the things that I enjoy doing shouldn’t matter to anyone, and it shouldn’t matter to myself. Maybe it’s okay to just be okay.
In case you missed it, I lived in Manchester for 5 years and somehow developed a proper Mancunian accent. Somehow I ended up on Nathan Rae’s podcast “Northology” in 2013, talking about Manchester Girl Geeks, a not-for-profit community group I co-founded a few years prior (they’re still going strong, 10 years later!). If you want to listen to 30 minutes of me being proper Northern, the recording is still online.
When I joined Flatiron Health in February 2014, I had no idea what to expect. I had just moved to New York City – my second ever trip to the US – with two suitcases, crashed on my friend’s couch, and walked into the office in the middle of a snowstorm (I got in late on my first day because I was left stranded by the MTA – pro move!). I was on a 1-year visa and didn’t even know whether it was going to get extended after the year was up, or whether the 20-person startup I had just joined after finishing my PhD in England was even going to last that long.
Almost 5 1/2 years later I’m now looking back onto many late nights at the office, countless meals with my work family, a few drinks (just a few, really!), late night karaoke, rafting and ski trips, pipeline breaks and product launches, both great and absolutely horrifying client calls, several rounds of funding, an acquisition (us buying a company twice our size), another acquisition (this time us getting acquired), almost a thousand new employees, many farewells, wonderful relationships, challenging relationships, my first intern, my first direct report, my first time as a team lead, and my first goodbye to a company that I still talk about as “we” even though I officially left almost a month ago. As I like to tell people who ask me about my time at Flatiron: It’s been a wild ride.
So… what’s next? Honestly, I don’t know. I want to continue doing “data stuff”, but as a non-traditional (as far as the word “traditional” applies to a fairly new field) data scientist who puts data empathy and interpretability before building ML models, it’s going to be an interesting challenge to find the right fit for me. For now, I’m still based in NYC, enjoying the summer, plotting some travel, and reflecting on the things I’ve learned over the past few years.
I already showcased a gallery of Hackathon t-shirts I designed for our Flatiron Health hacks a few posts back. Of course, Hackathons are much more than just t-shirts, so earlier this year my fellow engineer Ovadia and I wrote up a 2-part series of blog posts about Hackathons.
After a couple of major production fires on our analytics pipelines that required us to drop everything and push through several migrations, my fellow engineer Zach and I looked at each other and admitted that “this was terrible, but things are actually much better now” – and so, the term “Crisis Driven Development” was born. We shaped up our ideas around the concept enough to talk about it at an engineering all-hands at Flatiron Health, and followed up with a couple of blog posts.
Zach’s post (the first part of the saga) focuses on how to be in a good spot to actually keep pushing forward during production fires instead of rolling everything back, and emerge on the other side in a better state.
The second part that I wrote then takes a step back and thinks through what makes ‘Crisis Driven Development’ so successful, and how we can apply those principles to a regular development cycle instead of a crisis – a controlled burn, so to say. And while none of this is entirely new, I do like how it can introduce a slightly different way of interacting and working together than the go-to mode of agile sprints and tickets. Let me know what you think – feel free to comment here, on Medium, or hit me up on Twitter.
Within my first six months at Flatiron I started helping out, and then later running, our company Hackathons: two days every quarter where the entire team (engineers and non-engineers) is encouraged to get (even more) creative and spin up new product prototypes, try out technologies, liberally fix bugs, or dig deep into our data.
An important part of our Hackathon tradition, along with the Thursday night pizza, are the t-shirts, which I’ve been designing almost every time for the past two years. What started out as a necessity has now become one of my favorite parts about the Hackathon – I get to play around with design tools and see people wearing the shirts I designed almost every day! I’m quite pleased with them, so I thought I’d share them with the world. Here are some of the most recent t-shirts I put together for our Hackathons.
Thanks to the NYC Women in Machine Learning & Data Science meetup group, I was able to attend this year’s PyGotham conference on a weekend in late August. With PyGotham being a fairly young conference (it was started in 2011 as an “eclectic Py-centric tech conference”), I had not heard of it before and did not quite know what to expect – and I was positively surprised by the breadth of inspiring talks and the number of enthusiastic Pythonistas I met that weekend.
Day One started bright and early with a 9am keynote by Nick Coghlan of Red Hat, who gave an insightful talk about the challenges of making open source development sustainable. He pointed out that a number of open source projects were handed over to the community where contributors would be happy to add new exciting features, but maintenance and bug fixes were expected to be carried out by “magic internet pixies”. His mention of the importance of work-life balance for open source contributors in particular struck a note with me, since this is something that is often overlooked when talking about getting involved in the open source community.
After a short break to rearrange the rooms, the day continued with a series of thirty minute talks. As a data insights engineer, I was particularly interested in learning more about the tools of the trade, and potentially also hear about some relevant technologies and frameworks that I might not come in touch with on a daily basis. I attended a presentation by Jeff Uthaichai and Chris Becker, who gave an excellent introduction to Docker, a tool that supports software deployment by allowing users to create a “container” which contains an application along with all its dependencies. The main focus of the talk was a series of recorded demos that showed how easy (or not…) it is to deploy a Docker container to different cloud hosting services. After a short break, the morning session continued with a talk by another excellent speaker, Jeremiah Malina of ChatID, who demonstrated how to set up a real-time analytics services using InfluxDB, a distributed time series database, using an easy to understand example of counting site visits associated with a referral ID.
Of course, attending talks at conferences is only half of the fun – the other half is meeting new people with similar interests, and so I spent most of the breaks in the breakout area outside the conference rooms, filling up on coffee, snacking on cookies, chatting with other attendees, and swapping business cards. One of my highlights of the weekend was my attempt to roll around the breakout area on a self-balancing scooter – think small Segway without anything to hold on to! – which the team from SinglePlatform had brought along.
After lunch, I attended a non-Python talk, which happened to be one of my favorites of the day. Thomas Ballinger, also known as the “Terminal Whisperer”, gave us a whirlwind tour of everything you’ve never thought of doing with your terminal, but you wouldn’t want to miss now that you know how to do it – from replacing existing text and changing text colors to blinking text and advice on how to create blinking git commit messages, Thomas’ talk provided plenty of inspiration on how to make command line interfaces more user-friendly. My final talk of the day was Jarret Petrillo’s excellent introduction to building a data aggregation app in Flask, a Python web framework, or self-proclaimed “microframework”, that can be seen as a lightweight alternative to the popular Django framework.
Day Two of PyGotham started with an engaging keynote talk by Jessica McKellar, a former Director for the Python Software Foundation, who asked us to imagine the Python community as a company which faces issues of sustainability and accessibility. She highlighted a few problems, such as the difficulties of running Python on Windows computers, which basically prohibits its uptake in schools that make heavy use of Windows PCs, and will continue to do so in the near future. Jessica concluded her talk with a very specific call to action to address Python’s accessibility for beginners as a first step to improving the position of “Python, Inc”.
Jessica’s keynote was followed by talk on code reviews by Amy Hanlon, a Hacker School (now Recurse Center) graduate and software engineer at Venmo who I had known since she gave a brilliant demo on overwriting builtin Python functions with Harry Potter spells at a PyLadies meetup in 2014. Amy gave another excellent and insightful presentation, listing some guidelines for code authors and reviewers, and explaining how reducing the amount of ground work a reviewer needs to do (understanding the code, spotting bugs, …) frees up time to get more valuable feedback on your code. After an extended break, I managed to catch the end of Sven Kreiss’ talk on pysparkling, a Python implementation of Spark’s Resilient Distributed Dataset (RDD) interface, had some exciting conversations with attendees from as far as the Dominican Republic over lunch, and met fellow female Pythonistas at the PyLadies NYC mingling session.
The next talk turned out to be another highlight of the weekend: SQLAlchemy ORM as demonstrated through the power of cookies. Jason Myers presented a wonderfully humorous step-by-step demo of setting up a cookie ordering system with SQLAlchemy ORM, a SQL abstraction toolkit that allows users to interacts with relational data as objects by abstracting from the underlying database layer. Jason’s talk was followed by an interesting, though mildly worrying, presentation by Ashwini Oruganti, an Eventbrite engineer and director of the Python Software Foundation, who gave an introduction to HTTPS and pointed out some of the common security flaws in OpenSSL. The final session of this afternoon block was yet another excellent live demo by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis of MongoDB, who walked us through the setup of an application using asynchronous node.js style “coroutines” in Python’s asyncio module.
And with that, my weekend at PyGotham came to a close – a great little conference full of passionate Pythonistas and enthusiastic newcomers, which I will happily attend again in 2016.
PEOPLES. After 5 1/2 years in Manchester, a few weeks in Barcelona, and four months in Germany (living with my parents… oh the glamour!) I’ve somehow ended up working in New York. Yes, I have a job. I pay taxes. I’ve signed a lease for an apartment. I pay bills. I tried to apply for a credit card and got rejected. I’m a proper adult now, me. Life has been pretty crazy as you can possibly imagine, but here’s some pictures to keep you entertained while I’m gearing up for another round of mightaswell.
Sam Bail 
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