My Python and Data Analysis Journey

I recently found out about the She Loves Data (SLD) community through my amazing company. Apparently quite a few colleagues of mine are volunteering and helping the SLD community. There was this Introduction to Python workshop by SLD and I found out that they are looking for volunteers as there were a lot of registrations. I was encouraging some of my friends to volunteer and mentor in the workshop to help participants. Later I found out that even men can help! That’s how it all started. I volunteered to mentor.

I had no idea about python, at least I wasn’t confident. I had seen some basic code before, as lot of people write python code and some of my friends were among these python developers. I was like - How hard can it be? It’s only an Introductory workshop. I can learn the basics too. I’ll learn and then answer questions while mentoring in the workshop. So that’s what I did! I used all the material that the volunteers had created for the workshop - the slide decks, the google colab notebook. I was pairing with a friend while learning and she seemed to know enough python, so she gave me a few new terms, that prompted me to learn more. A lot of my learning was based on - hey, I need to be a mentor in this workshop, I need to be able to answer at least basic questions, so I NEED to learn this! And I did learn enough. I made sure I was aware of all the exercises that they were going to do, and had a guess of what kind of questions they might have, based on what questions I had while learning, of course people could ask more questions too. In the basics, there were sections to start from scratch - variables, data types, and then control flow - conditional statements, loops. Finally functions and importing of modules like math. I also learned about lamda functions. It was fun!

I realized that workshops are a good way for me to learn things and also teach! I think it’s very important that a teacher learns too in the process of teaching. Learn through more reading, learn through the various questions the participants ask and their different thoughts. And yes, I do know that learning is one thing, teaching is another. It’s not easy to teach someone something. You need to be able empathize with the person on the other side who is new to the topic and be able to teach them something new with the help of their existing knowledge. There are teaching methods too I think. I have heard of only “Socratic method”, where you, the teacher, asks questions and prompts the participants to think and understand about the new topic. Of course there will be new terms that the participants will not know, but they surely can think logically based on existing knowledge, so asking questions, prompting them to think, helps.

In this workshop, we worked out a similar teaching method, where we give questions, that is, practical exercises, and teach related new topics before hand and let them think about how to apply and solve them. Sometimes learn a bit more out of the box (apart from the slides) and solve them.

So that’s how I learned some python basics, something more than what I already knew, by volunteering for mentoring in a workshop.

My Journey in Data Analysis has started in a similar manner! I have volunteered for Data Analysis with Python which will happen tomorrow. For this workshop, I learned with the slides and google colab notebook material that was used in previous workshops. I learned by working practically on two data sets - AFL data set and then Pokemon data set. It was pretty interesting! The jupyter notebook for Pokemon data that I learned from can be found here.

I felt like I was still too new to Data Analysis and wrapping my head around it. I still feel like that 😅 I started doing some more practicing using the two colab notebooks I had access to, and then I tried out the freecodecamp’s Introduction to the Data Analysis with Python course I quickly realized that they were all videos, and I had learned some of the basics that the initial videos spoke about. So, sadly I got a bit bored. But I did go through the first few videos, and then stopped. Some new things I learned about was more about jupyter notebook, like keyboard shortcuts and then about different free cloud hosting services to help with running jupyter notebook or jupyter lab, a super set of jupyter notebook

After those first few videos, I moved on to the freecodecamp projects section for Data Analysis with Python. I have done 2 projects now. There are totally 5 projects. So, 3 more left. And after doing all the 5 projects, one is eligible for a freecodecamp certification for Data Analysis with Python :D :D

So, that was my journey about getting into Python and Data Analysis. Come to think of it, I would have never tried any such new thing if I relied on interest and motivation. Just exploring, and for getting the small stuff like certifications, it’s good that I learned something as a side effect. And of course the volunteering for the workshop is the magic that caused everything! The fear that I wouldn’t know anything to call myself a mentor also kept me going subconsciously I think :P 😅

I think I’m doing better now. I know something about Python and Data Analysis. All because I have been doing lots and lots of practice. I have also been checking out YouTube videos to learn basic statistics stuff and also reading statistics articles

Today I started to simply checkout about Parquet after a colleague mentioned he did an OSS contribution related to it. I was just checking out the presentations, one of the videos. An old video. I also found out lots of stuff from that video by just seeing half of it. It was not easy to get my head around some of the things. But I became aware of a lot of new stuff like some research papers, some encodings ;)

I think it’s all about being curious and trying to learn something new everyday. And I usually learn to teach or write about it :)