Weeknote #36 [W26.27-28] - I'm the analytics guy at work now, and the return of recurring migraines

People like looking at pretty charts

In my last weeknote, I wrote about how I had made a dashboard for tracking the results ofa NPS survey at work.

Turns out, people really like looking at pretty charts.

People liked it so much that I have made five more analytics dashboards since then, with several more in the works.

Whcih makes sense, the company I work at has been around for almost 5 years now. They have accumulated a ton of data over that time, but with little visibility to it. Until now, the only way to explore the data was through manually compiled Excel sheets (which aren’t always accurate or up to date).

Some teams in the company have also been running customer feedback surveys for some time, without anyone even looking at the results on a regular basis. I have been making dashboards for these as well.

As soon as people had something to look at, they also started coming up with new ideas on how they want to see that data represented.

Sometimes having something visible to react to sparks off more ideas, compared to having nothing at all. Which, I think, is ove of the advantages of deploying features with LLMs. You can quickly prototype something with real data, push it to productions, and iterate quickly after it is live. Which is a fundametally different way of working than what we have been used to. Earlier, since most teams wouldn’t have the bandwidth to endlessly reiterate feature designs, we’d spend way more time on planning and getting things right the first time. But that meant the cycle of user feedback and iteration was much slower.

Both my manager and the CEO asked me to prioritize making more of these over everything else. Which is what I have been doing, and I’m enjoying it a lot.

Return of the migraine

Lately, I have been getting these debilitating headaches concentrated on the front right quadrant of my head quite frequently.

I think there are a few possible causes:

• pollution,
• lack of physical activity (my neck, in particular, feels like it’s made of stone),
• indigestion, after eating greasy food, and
• stress, or some for of overstimulation.

I think these are the reasons because I have been getting these headaches mostly during or after Cinema Next Door screenings.

I generally go to the office on Tuesdays, and I travel from work to Underline for the screenings around office hours, when traffic (and the pollution that accompanies it) is at its peak.

Since I don’t have time to go home in betweem, it means I end up having all my meals outside. The auto ride from work to Underline is overstimulating for my senses as well, with all the honking and general chaos. If not that, there’s the film screening, and all the people at the screening, which can be overstimulating too.

Plus, my levels of physical activity hasn’t helped. It has been abysmaly low in the last 4 months.

Before that, I had a gym subscription at Electronic City and I would ocassionally go there. But since I moved to HSR in March, I have made no attampt to find a replacement. (Which made me finally get a cult.fit subscription last week. But it remains to be seen if I’ll end up making any use of it.)

As a child, I used to frequently get debelitating migraines too. There was a period where I’d get these multiple times a week.

This period coincided with my time in Durgapur (2006-2010). Which further makes me think pollution must be a major contributor.

Durgapur is surrounded by steel plants and factories and the air quality is consequently very bad. And that’s where I had the worst and most frequent bouts of migraine. It also got better immediately after we moved away from there to Bhibaneshwar.

In the last few years, I have rarely experienced migraines. Perhaps only once or twice a year, on average.

Here are a few things I have found that helps during these episodes:

• complete sensory deprivation, which includes putting myself in an absultely dark room with all lights turned off, curtains drawn, doors closed; while also tightly covering my eyes with a sleeping mask (or sometimes scarves), and wrapping myself in a blanket,
• puking, when that is possible,
• washing my hair with cold water, and
• balancing a bottle on my head while lying down (this is something I saw on an Instagram reel, and while it may sound ridiculous, it’s surprisingly effective once you get past the initial irritation of failing while trying to balance it).