I have been gradually developing skills as a programmer and data scientist since graduating from college two years ago. I started by teaching myself Python in my free time, because I thought it would be useful to know. Many people I knew were using it after all! My learning was initially haphazard. I learned and understood basic Python techniques, but my knowledge felt purposeless. It wasn’t until I tried to solve a major problem from my day-to-day life with Python (a story I'll share later) that my knowledge gained purpose. By applying Python to something personal, my Python skills quickly solidified, and my motivation to continue to learn and solve problems through coding intensified. It was also through tackling my initial problem that I discovered an entirely new passion: data science.
I intend to use this blog mainly as an exposition of my data projects large and small, interesting discoveries, and snippets of projects that never took off, but whose scraps are worth sharing. I also want this blog to be a resource for others: for the new and curious hoping to foray into data science, for those in search of a particular technique, and for those lacking a strong technical background but who are nonetheless interested in data. I hope for my posts to be accessible to a wide range of backgrounds and skill levels. I say this as someone who is not a trained statistician, nor a seasoned software developer, nor a data wonk. I am just someone interested in data who has many ideas and wants to share them. My words and my code do not have to be perfected or polished to be posted.
I am primarily interested in civic data, i.e. data that can be leveraged to serve the public good, especially when it intersects with public transit and geography. Many data sets featured on this blog will have a connection to Chicago, the city that I call home. I mostly work with Python—especially Jupyter, pandas, and numpy—as well as JavaScript/D3.js to create visualizations. As I learn and grow and add more libraries and languages into my toolbox, I will share my discoveries here.
I’ve learned a lot so far on my journey, and it would be a shame if I just hoarded my knowledge. Earlier this year, I came across a tweet that I think back to often. It is one of the inspirations for starting this blog:
"Things that are still on your computer are approximately useless." -@drob #eUSR #eUSR2017 pic.twitter.com/nS3IBiRHBn
— Amelia McNamara (@AmeliaMN) November 3, 2017