I do not know much about their workplace but I think you are assuming too much when you say you are sure his co-workers were just fine with it. I worked in academia and startups all my life so I am used to seeing casual shirts being worn but that was way too much. We do not hang that kind of pictures around the office. We do not want people to look at that kind of pictures in the office. Not just in the office also in any work related function. How can you claim that nobody in his workplace was offended when he is walking around with pictures that would be offensive in any other form?
I work at a small startup with only 2 people in analytics. We build the infrastructure, data pipelines and do the BI analysis and data science. And I really enjoy knowing how it all comes together and being able to change anything in the pipeline. Maybe not having enough money for a big data department is our blessing.
Watch Douglas Crockford's video series that he made at Yahoo. Get a copy of his book and read it.
Make sure you understand the prototypical nature of Javascript as opposed to the class structure in other languages and how to use it effectively. Also make sure to understand scope, how "this" keyword relates to scope and finally callback functions.
That is pretty much it. JS is very powerful once you get comfortable with it. It was designed in a very short time (~2 weeks) so it has some quirks but do not let those get to you.
Yes, I expect to use statistical models/ML. I am more comfortable with Python rather than Java so I will look into the NLTK first. Thank you for your response!
I agree that ML or data science would be feasible. I am working on data science/machine learning as well, I have taken classes from coursera and trying to work on it on the side. As I mentioned above, my progress is slow as most of my time is spent on my day job. It is hard to tell if I am on the right track without working in the field. Thank you for your suggestions.
Thank you for your input. A situation "where I am proximal to good developers and expected to be learning SE practices while working as a subject matter expert (SME) to developers" would be the perfect solution for me. It is just difficult to find.
I am flexible on salary besides junior devs are already making same or more than me as a hardware guy.