Dattatray Dagale

3 Times Machine Learning Already Made Decisions About Your Money (Without You Knowing)

Last Tuesday, on my 45-minute local train ride from Kalyan to Dadar, I got rejected for a credit card I didn't even apply for. Let me explain. I was sitting in the 7:15 AM crowd, AirPods in, scrolling through my banking app on my OnePlus. I noticed a notification: "Your pre-approved credit card application has been declined." I hadn't fill…

Python vs Excel: Which Should You Learn First

I spend three hours commuting every day—ninety minutes from Kalyan to Bandra, ninety minutes back. That's where I think. Last month, on the local train, a junior analyst from my team asked me: "Should I learn Python or get better at Excel first?" I didn't answer immediately. Because the honest answer isn't what most people expect. For …

5 AI Tools That Cut My Weekly Work Hours From 40 to 20 (And How to Actually Use Them)

It was 8:47 PM on a Tuesday, and I was still at my desk in Morningstar's Navi Mumbai office. My manager had asked for a comparative analysis of 15 mutual fund schemes — something that would normally take me two full days of cross-referencing spreadsheets, pulling data from multiple sources, and manually formatting tables. I had exactly one evening to finis…

Two Years of Ignoring GitHub Until a ₹5 Lakh Opportunity Made Me Finally Learn It

I used to think GitHub was just for people who coded for a living. Not a thought I'm proud of, but it's honest. Working as a data analyst at Morningstar, I'd built models in Python, written SQL queries, created dashboards in Tableau — all without ever properly understanding version control. My scripts lived in folders on my laptop. When I updated…

Stop Learning Tools You'll Forget. Learn This Instead

I'm going to say something that will probably upset a few data analysts scrolling LinkedIn right now: knowing SQL and Python isn't enough anymore. Neither is Tableau. Neither is anything else you learned from a ₹15,000 online course last year. Here's why I'm saying this in January 2025, sitting in my Morningstar office overlooking the Mumbai s…

ChatGPT Won't Replace Your Job, But Someone Using It Will

Six months ago, I was sitting on the 8:15 AM local train from Kalyan to Dadar, scrolling through LinkedIn like everyone else, and I saw something that made me genuinely uncomfortable. A colleague at Morningstar had posted: "Used ChatGPT to write my entire quarterly report. Saved 12 hours. Delivered yesterday." My first reaction? Panic. My second? Sk…