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10 pieces of advice to beginner data scientists (shapescience.xyz)
18 points by aflam 2952 days ago | 5 comments


1 point by aflam 2951 days ago | link

Hi everyone, author here. This blog is very young, feedback will be all the more appreciated! Thanks to all.

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2 points by antognini 2949 days ago | link

I agree completely with the recommendation to write up results in Jupyter notebooks. I started doing this a few months ago and it's been a major improvement. Before I would just copy and paste important plots into a Word document and add some text, which was really suboptimal. It's very useful to have the "complete picture" in code, pictures, and words all in one place.

By the way, you have a typo at the end of the post: "fondamental" -> "fundamental".

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1 point by aflam 2949 days ago | link

Thanks a lot! Literate programming is also immensely helpful. to me. The typo will be corrected very shortly - French mistake.

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2 points by Ra 2949 days ago | link

Hey, nice article!

I especially liked the encouragement to talk to as many non-specialist colleagues as possible. The emphasis on continuous learning is good too.

I had some minor suggestions:

> Rely on strong fundamentals

You might want to add statistics and math here. However, you're so right to emphasise _fundamentals_! So often we have unidentified holes in our background.

Also, don't forget to add a suggestion in 'Always be learning': subscribe to DataTau!

Also, MOOCs such as Coursera and Kahn Academy for boning up on fundamentals. There are plenty of free resources. Then you can get your feet wet on Project Euler and, importantly, Kaggle. Some people swear by code boot-camps (but this seems to depend strongly on the boot-camp).

> Be decent at visualization

You've given some nice suggestions above. Why not some here, such as Shiny, ggplot2, Seaborn, mpld3?

> Document what you do

Another suggestion I would have is to try and choose tractable projects that you can stake ownership of. Perhaps try and make a cool infographic etc.

You can learn a huge amount from side projects and it can demonstrate you have initiative.

Finally, it's a little difficult to determine the scope of the article. Is it for people who already consider themselves Data Scientists? Or aspirants? If it's the latter, I'd also add that the job application process can be very revealing/informative. Join jobs networks like LinkedIn and Glassdoor and just look at what companies are asking for in terms of skills etc. If you feel ready enough, applying and hopefully interviewing can be instructive. Get in touch with other Data Scientists!

Thanks, keep it up!

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1 point by aflam 2949 days ago | link

Thanks a lot for taking the time to write your comment. I agree with much of it. Expect a few changes in the article by tomorrow. Best!

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