House-sitting and Data Science Scholarship

Wait..what?

• I’m House-sitting this weekend. Actually, from Saturday to Tuesday. I guess it’s not a big deal, but I’ve never done it before, and I am ecstatic! It’s a family house of a good friend of mine (who has a famous brother…yay LA!) and they have the most amazing dog! I will be sure to include a photo. Also, the neighbour’s dog is an 120 pound German Shepherd! TWICE the FUN! :D

Also…

• I received another Nanodegree scholarship to the Data Analyst Path! I’m super excited, because just before that, I was trying to get more deeply into Python by learning Django, and I have to say, it was uhh…not that enjoyable for me.

• I honestly don’t enjoy running a one-line script and having 100 nested folders show up on my desktop. I die a bit. I want to dig in, see the engine, and see what goes where and ask a gazillion questions about how it works, so I can have an abstract idea of how each element works.

• I’m one of those people who secretly seethes when someone tells me “You don’t need to know how that works.” Usually, I’ll nod, say “OK” and then look it up myself :D

• I ended up doing a statistics course instead (this was actually before I even found out about the scholarship.)

• I could not be more thankful to all the people at Udacity and AT and T. I’m eternally grateful for their continued support of me.

• That being said, at some point I will learn Django, and go through it thoroughly, from the ground up. I’ve done a bit of Flask and parsing JSON in the past.

• People keep saying I’d make a good machine learning engineer, so.. we’ll see. I still have to do the work and get the job, eventually. But it is true; I do read a lot of that stuff on my own, without being prompted. It’s just really interesting to me.

• For example, the Relu function is, at its core, like half-wave rectification in electronics. Half-wave rectification is such a perfect analogy for me, because it reminds me of a diode, which is an electronic filter, and we have filters in lambdas in Python, and Haskell.

# if f(x) is more than 0, return x else return 0
def relu(x):
  if x < 0:
    return 0
  else:
    return x

• Or a ternary operation

  relu -> 0 if a < 0 else a
  

• Or a filter

relu = filter(lambda x: x if x > 0 else 0)

• I guess you could map a lambda like that over a group of say, matrices or tensors. Sort of like how you would apply it to an image to do things like shifting pixel-colours or something.

So…

• I’ve been doing Data Analysis using Jupyter, using Python, pandas numpy, learning SQL (I took a class once but it’s a blur since then) and in between, took up a Data Wrangling course that uses Python and Mongo DB. So yeah..a lot of Data Analysis and a lot of Python :D

• In the midst of that, I’ve also been helping to mentor (wait for it..) 19 students via Udacity. I’ve really been enjoying it, and encouraging students. It seems that a lot of the students I’ve been given are doing Data Analysis, also, in Python, for the Intro coursework, so I’ve been really getting used to the data and the types of mistakes that could be made.

So upcoming…

• It looks like with all my side-hustles, I’ll be able to afford Haskellbook for Christmas! Can you believe it!? My goal would be to either be able to do data analysis with Python or Haskell. As for C++, I don’t know..maybe I’ll still make games and stuff with it from time to time? I still have to use it in 2018, as it’s been the majority of my path for classes in school (they have one intro Python class, so I didn’t bother to enroll in that one; it’s pretty simple stuff). C++ has certainly helped me understand things on a deeper level, in terms of how things are processed/ just work on a computer.

• My brother said that people have often said that Python has the most “staying power”. I can believe that. It’s also incredibly expressive.

• Of course, some random member of my family could be reading this and buy Haskellbook for me, too (haha). That’s happened in the past :D My family is all pretty computer literate; I think there are about 20 computers between all of us, if you count the partitions (Windows/ Linux) and stuff (and not the devices like tablets or Alexas; that would put it around 25 or so?)

• I’m thankful for everything, and I really want to continue programming no matter what.

And…that’s it.