My journey into the field of Data Science has taught me one essential lesson……dedication. It is the one thing I have understood about most endeavours in life, that is, if you want to succeed you have to be dedicated. I rushed into studying what I could about programming and was unable to take a clear direction until I attended a bootcamp (Ironhack) which set me on my path giving me some very valuable tools and lessons.
It gave me a sense of proportion over the field of Data Science and the discipline necessary to gain the skills I would possibly need in the future. I gained a confidence that if I didn’t know it, I could quickly dive into the documentation or tutorial and start experimenting. I learned a spirit of doing, without needing anyone’s approval or permission, which is both terrifying and exciting. Facing my first page of documentation, I felt like a turtle pulling his head back into his shell, my eyes protest against the cursed text I was reading. Now, I am hopping from one page to another, in a race to get an answer that I know is out there somewhere. If it isn’t, I will get to the bottom of it myself.
So 3 painful months later with 700 hours of study under my belt, I was released from Ironhack with my head still reeling……what had I just gone through?……and now I needed to find a job? I really didn’t know how that was going to happen……still a work in progress……I needed to decompress but not lose the momentum I had built up.
A number of data science youtubers popped up on my radar through desperate searches for answers and walkthroughs. One was the notably relaxed and approachable Ken Jee…and Ken had a proposition….more like a challenge, which he wanted to apply to his life and, as he had a community, he proposed it others who followed him on the social medias. He wanted to apply a daily task of learning at least one thing new in data science each day. It didn’t have to be anything grand but there was no limitation except a minimum of 66 consecutive days had to be met as a way to create a strong habit of independent learning. There was even a Discord server that he had set up on his first round (which I had missed because I was on my freight train ride at the bootcamp) that people could join and share what they accomplished each day.
I had found my plugin to keep me motivated in the days and weeks and months ahead. Changing professions means that you lose your professional community a bit and finding your new peers with whom you can “talk shop” with takes some time. It is always a little lonely. So, I joined the server and started posting. It can be an indirect path when you study data science because you need to have a lot of general knowledge of the field and the fields that it can apply to (everything…apparently). Along the way I learned the benefit of keeping some type of journal or record of activity that you can “show off” on LinkedIn. Keep your other accounts active, like GitHub. And basically you have to find a way to promote yourself and activity and that you are ALWAYS doing something, else this simply turns into a personal hobby and you become some data-hungry hermit starving in cave with eyes as big a tablet screen from straining in the dark and no one knows who you are.
During that challenge there were times when I wanted to write more and explore the topics I had learned in order to solidify them for myself and have to jump between some notebook or other, my GitHub, and the discord server. Sometimes, I wanted these entries to feel more exploratory and off-script than just a reporting of what I did. It seemed like a blog journal would be the right format for this. I considered Medium and the wonderfully curated look of some of those articles but that would also mean publishing on other domains and I would feel more hedged in by expecting a polished product. My previous work as a freelance English teacher taught me the benefits of publishing your own material on your own domain and linking to all your other social medias. This means you can own your work and promote your business or yourself and I like this style much better.
So, I have resurrected my blog and I will start to make regular posts here about my journey and what I learn. I will hopefully ramble and be inconsistent and forget and not always be correct. I will try to always be exploratory in these posts…I will try to be clear and deliberate with what I learn. I am not an expert and my path is irregular but that is reality and I want to stay faithful to that. Now that I can worry more about quantity rather than quality, when quality does happen, I can still take it over to a place like Medium and publish there to get more traction.
There will be a new round of 66 days of data on July 1 and I will be here doing my work everyday, starting a few days before….as a journeyman on his way to being a professional.