Sitrep - October 2025
What do I do when I don’t write?
I work.
I’m a Billing Analyst, which is basically a Data Analyst that has billing and financial skills on top, <sarcasm> but don’t tell that to recruiters anywhere, as they seem to think I’m not a good fit for Data Analyst roles. </sarcasm>
Nevertheless, while I can’t talk about proprietary stuff involved in my work, I can elaborate a bit on my pain points.
Example: I have over 10 years experience with Oracle Databases, and since August I work exclusively with MariaDB, amongst other new tools. So, not Oracle.
The problem with MariaDB is that it’s not as straightforward as Oracle. Let’s take this simple example, where I select the events that occurred in the last week, supposedly from a table called “events”.
--Oracle. Simple, yes?
SELECT * FROM events WHERE date > SYSDATE - 7;
--MariaDB (two versions, you pick your favorite cause I can't)
SELECT * FROM events WHERE date > DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 7 DAY);
SELECT * FROM events WHERE date > NOW() - INTERVAL 7 DAY;If this gets so complicated for this simple query, imagine what happens when I have to handle more complex queries. Which I do, duh!
Rewiring my brain is part of the process in engaging and accommodating with a new workplace and its processes. The worst part is that it’s tedious to learn. The best? Once you’re done assimilating, you can start to take ownership, and that’s when the fun begins. Because you can work independently, enhance the process and then make it work even better.
The SQL query example is meant to emphasize some of what occupied my time lately. And this was one of the nice parts, because I love diving into queries and rewriting them, but there are also other pains on the list, which are much more… painful.
One of them? Accounting.
I dislike accounting. Accounting is the science of overcomplicating finance. You can quote me on that.
I once had to calculate my personal net income from an LLC (a company) that I owned while working on a B2B contract (never again!).
The tax system in Romania for the salary of an individual is: 25% pension contribution, 10% health insurance contribution, and then 10% of the leftover is the income tax.
Let’s say my gross income has a value of 100.
How I calculated:
(100*0.65)*0.9 = 65*0.9 = 58.5How my accountant calculated:
(10/100)*100 = 10
(25/100)*100 = 25
100-10-25 = 65
(10/100)*65 = 6.5
65-6.5 = 58.5We were sitting next to each other to establish budgets and the correct tax classification, and this was one of the steps for calculating the net salary of 1 employee (me, in this case, as I was my own employee) that we had to do during our discussion.
We both got the same value, but took different roads.
Now, I’m a numbers guy, but I also like to be efficient: Why use the longer road when you can use the shorter one? But accountants don’t do that. They are accustomed to longer roads and manual work. They never try to optimize, they just use the same templates over and over.
With my new job, I also interact with an accounting component. And my fears are confirmed: there are a lot manual tasks and ear scratching with the opposite hand. This stubbornness is also one of the reasons it’s tough to automate the accounting component - accountants use tools that involve GUIs and clicks instead of queries and scripts.
If I want to extract a report, I optimize a query and extract the report by running the query.
If they want to extract a report, they just extract what is available in that GUI, sometimes with minimal customization. Even where customization is available, it’s a pain to click all the checkmarks of all the options, scroll until you find what you need, et caetera, et caetera.
There are more constraints in a GUI (Graphical User Interface) than in a CLI (Command Line Interface) and while I’ll never understand why some people prefer GUIs, I will always attempt to optimize the processes, because otherwise there won’t be any progress.
But enough with the work for now.
I play.
Because all work and no play makes Indru a dull boy. And when you can breathe a little but you’re too tired to do something else, you relax with a game.
Got myself FC26 and now I am shaping up a nice team in UT (Ultimate Team) mode.
But this year’s true pièce de résistance is the Career Mode (at least the Manager Career, which I like to play, as opposed to the Player Career). It’s much better than in previous years and it feels more like a simulator, unlike the arcade-y feel of Ultimate Team.
I’ve also recorded some funny content, as the game is full of weird misses, even weirder misses, Isak becoming Daniel Oprița (pronounced Opritsa, notorious Romanian player who missed a shot from the goal line with his knee in 2006 in an impossible-to-miss angle; I remember it like it was yesterday!) and a very special Goal Cancelling Technology (yes, that was clearly not offside - I won anyway but it’s annoying when this happens, and it happens more often than I’d like).
I read.
Book Club’s third read is “The Shadow of The Wind”, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, which is one of my favorite books - definitely in my top 10 - and I already read that one, so I’m reading “Babel”, by Rebecca F. Kuang instead (the first read of the Book Club, which I didn’t because it was prior to me joining).
Three things to draw from here:
First rule of Book Club is to always talk about Book Club.
If you haven’t read “The Shadow of The Wind”/”La sombra del viento” yet, please go pick it up as soon as you finish reading this blog post. You have no excuse.
“Babel” got me hooked and I can’t wait to go deeper. I’ll be back with impressions on Goodreads. The premise is fascinating.
I watch stuff. Mostly TV shows.
October was finish-your-tv-backlog month, which meant I watched stuff that I’ve been postponing for years. I watch exclusively during breakfast and lunch, while I’m eating, so it’s pretty much absorbed into my itinerary.
This month I watched:
NCIS: Origins (Season 1), leftover episodes from last year’s season. I like it, but not as much as the original.
The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power (Season 2). Thanks, I hate it. On the plus side, we can generate electricity from J.R.R. Tolkien spinning in his grave. Yay!
Lucifer (Season 6) - I have been postponing this one for so long, and I just had to finish it. Not sure why it took me so much time to get around to it, but it was all worth it. Good ending!
WestWorld (Season 4) - the same as above. I have 5 more episodes though at the moment I am writing this, but I’ll probably finish it before Monday. Fantastic show, I just lacked the time to see the last season as it aired.
I also wait
…for the ZorinOS Team to open the direct upgrade flow to version 18, so that I can upgrade my Zorin OS Pro 17.3 installation to 18 on my PC. I need that because Zorin OS 18 is based on Ubuntu 24.04, and that’s the earliest version of Ubuntu supported by Pritunl, a VPN client I use at work.
And, yeah, I don’t want to reinstall everything.
Basically, this would enable me to securely work from my Linux environment instead of the current Windows 11 one.
And you know why I love Linux?
Less GUIs and clicks, more queries and scripts. #Automation
Your Friendly Neighborhood Data Analyst