My name is Aidan Heffernan. I am a mathematician come data scientist who likes to spend most of my free time working on some of my github projects, building various models or tools often using python as a core.
When im not head deep in programming or looking at some dataset I enjoy gaming, playing guitar or just relaxing listening to podcasts or watching youtube/netflix.
My story
Early Life
I was born and raised in the lovely city of Cork and as such have very strong opinions about being from Cork. Don’t worry I will try not to let inner Corkonian come out too often. Growing up I found an interest in gaming, playing guitar and maths.
College a Bacholor of Math
I was fortunate enough to get a place in a BSc Financial Mathematics course at DCU. Leaving my beloved Cork I was sad to go but was excited to begin a new chapter of my life in the big city Dublin.
I found myself in a modern university with lots of outgoing bright individuals, we got to do some pretty cool maths, I got my first taste of programming, joined loads of societies. There was more nights out and fun times than I would have expected from a bunch of mathematicians.
Professional Journey
I finished college with a first class honours in Financial Maths and nothing but ambition and opportunity ahead of me. I was fortunate enough to have been taken my first step on the carrier ladder at Citi Bank. There I gained some great experience and even got to develop some macros in VB to automate part of my work and build tools for my colleagues.
From there I moved onto Centaur Fund Services where I got to expand my knowledge working with SQL databases and VBA to build automated reporting tools for all the fund accountants. I was fortunate enough to have been awarded personality of the year there thanks to all my hard work and can do helping attitude. It was great to be able to help the people I worked with but I wanted to try my hand at helping clients directly so onto the next step.
Then I began my time working as a consultant for Financial Risk Solutions (FRS). There I was client facing, helping our clients to use the pension administration software Invest|Pro. I got to work on-site with clients building automated reports and data loaders for them. Then when not dealing directly with clients I was able to work with the great development team there to work out bugs, create tests and new features. I was a great opportunity and I really enjoyed my time there and learned so much from more VBA, more SQL, C++, Specflow and all the processes that go into making a full stack software solution for clients.
Through my time at FRS is started doing my CFA exams passed the first 2 within 18 months and was 2 months away from doing the CFA level III. It was during this time that I discovered the magic of Machine Learning. With my background in mathematics and managing data I knew then that was my next step.
College a Master Class
I signed up to do a MSc in Data Science and Analytics back in my lovely home city of Cork in the prestigious University of College Cork (UCC).
Then I began a great adventure learning all there is to know about Machine Learning. I went from being a enthusiast of python and its various ML and data libraries to a semi pro in all things data from various SQL, NoSQL and graphical databases to building an ensemble of models in python and R.