A walkthrough of the Udemy dashboard that got me a job offer from one of the biggest names in academic publishing. — On this and any other platform I purposefully avoid meta content, that is, content about content for the purpose of being, well, content. So, I hope you’ll excuse me while I break that rule for one second. After writing consistently for a few months I was shocked and humbled to…

Open-sourcing my personal data project ideas for data science, data analysis and data engineering for your benefit. — Too Little Time. Too Many Data Project Ideas. As a data science grad student, I became frustrated with one aspect of the field before I even entered it: How unimaginative and, frankly, boring, most data-oriented (data science, data analysis and data engineering) projects are. Don’t get me wrong; there are some very, very cool projects out there; for…

Learn how to audit a company for your user data, request data suppression or even demand total deletion — all in one email. — Don’t Mess With The Data Subject In my experience, no one is more sensitive to and protective of personal data than those, like myself, who work in the data science field. Although many who seek to protect customer data are ethically-minded, some are just trying to avoid a very real consequence.

As you gain proficiency, you gain confidence; this can lead to cutting corners — and the potential to make big mistakes. — As the great Han Solo once said “Don’t get cocky.” Confidence in technical work, especially data engineering, like everything else, works best in moderation. Too little confidence and you’ll collapse when debugging, whether there’s deadline pressure or not. You’ll overthink and over engineer.

Assumptions, oversights and American-bred naivety that led to me nearly spending the night at a German train station. — Sprinting into a boutique German hotel to plead for 100 Euros, cash, is the closest I’ve come to robbing anyone. It was well after dark and my wife and I had just endured eight hours on southbound trains out of Munich. …

Data science concepts to study before you start studying. — No school will teach you everything. But when it comes to the nature of data science programs and the large scope of complex topics that need to be covered, it is easy to fall behind, especially if you don’t come from a statistics, computer science or business intelligence background. With…

Store data scraped from Zillow in a BigQuery table and view. — Now that we’ve gotten the relevant data in part I, we can work on creating our final product: A BigQuery SQL table to be used for analysis. Recapping Part I The steps we’ve completed so far are: Making a request to our base URL and applying a header to avoid triggering a captcha …

Use Python to find an apartment on Zillow. — With many Zillow projects and tutorials focused on home buying, being a current apartment dweller, I thought it would be interesting to obtain Zillow apartment data, since the data returned is slightly less variable than home data and, in my opinion, can be more interesting to examine. I’ll demonstrate the…

It’s a senior’s job to put up with you; make that an easy task. — One of the most significant but least-talked-about hurdles when it comes to your first tech job isn’t applying, interviewing or on boarding. It’s earning respect. When you first start a new job, at any level, your co-workers are automatically skeptical of your abilities, your experience and even your personality. As…