Ok, I’m going to be frank here.
I’m skipping most of the Data Analytics portion of this course. It’s 9 Lessons, Day 71-80. It is all done using Google Colab Notebooks, it’s all extremely, extremely, extremely, repetitive, yet I am not really feeling like I am learning anything.
Every lesson amounts to, Open this Google Collab Notebook, which is a new and… interesting tool, I guess it’s similar to a Jupyter Notebook. It’s basically, running “code” in weird choppy step by step chunks. Each lesson amounts to.
- Open a provided CSV file.
- Make a Graph
- Format the Graph.
- Maybe do some layered graphs.
- Sometimes the type of graph is different (line, bar, scatter, etc).
It’s dull, it’s repetitive, I have almost zero interest in statistics and data science honestly. Fun Fact, Statistics is the one class I dropped in college. I could have gotten a minor in Math with my Mechanical Engineering Degree with one more math credit, so I took Statistics. It was the only class I had any actual homework in my last semester, everything else was writing reports, the homework was absolutely brutal, and the entire class felt like butchering math to create Conformation Bias. It was stupid, it doesn’t account for nuance and one offs, which is what you should actually care about because those are the failure points. I could go on and on.
Anyway, the sections tarted out pretty fun, learning new tool, making fancy graphs, then halfway through I found I was just copying and pasting answers from the lecture because I just wanted it to be over and I didn’t care about the material.
So I’m just, skipping it. This isn’t a graded University Course, hell I have made plenty of small side projects during this course to fill in the idea of “100 Projects in 100 Days”.
Also, if I wanted to make pretty charts, I would just use Microsoft Excel. Because I am already pretty good at that.
This leads into the final “stretch” of this course, which I have already started working on some. The Final 19 Projects, which are all basically, open ended suggestions. There is a Data Analytics one in there, which I actually probably will go ahead and throw together some Charts for. I have the perfect Data Set for it, ever since I bought my car, back in 2015, I’ve tracked my mileage and fuel usage every time I fill up (in Excel). I can dump out a huge CSV was and manipulate that data in Google Collab or a Jupyter Notebook.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.