I'm an assistant professor of data science at Tilburg University. As an independent consultant and trainer, I help organizations making sense of their data. Previously, I was a data scientist at Elsevier in Amsterdam and startups YPlan and Outbrain in New York City. I have an MSc in artificial intelligence from Maastricht University and a PhD in machine learning from Tilburg University. Recently, I wrote a book titled Data Science at the Command Line, which was published by O'Reilly Media.
The Joy of Not Coding
It's generally good practice to stick to one programming language for a particular project. The code will most likely be more consistent, more stable, and easier to maintain. However, sometimes, when you just need to get stuff done, it can be more effective to mix and match.
For example, you want to make use of a fast image processing library written in C++, only you happen to be coding in JavaScript. Or consider the situation where you previously solved a certain problem in R, and now you need to solve that same problem again for a Python-based project. It's situations like these that can take the joy out of coding.
Don't despair. In this talk I discuss several tricks to mix and match both languages and tools so you can get stuff done. What's more, you'll be able to spend more time coding on the truly interesting problems. Joy!