More specifically, I signed up for yet another Specialist Diploma. This one was in Data Analytics.
No, I'm not some kind of masochist. But as a software developer, it was a professional obligation on my part to take an interest, if not be some kind of Jedi Master, in the various ways new skills could be picked up and applied. Also, I was past 40 at this point and the financial burden of taking up these courses was made negligible by generous subsidies from the Singapore government.
And what better time to do this, than at a time I didn't really have much else going on? What else would I be doing with my time - planning overseas vacations I couldn't go to? It wasn't like FOMO was going to kick in here. Also, as mentioned before in a prior blogpost, I had been exploring Data Visualization and this looked like a good direction to continue.
So yep. I bit the bullet.
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| Lessons delivered via video call. |
After all the messy administration work, the October of 2020 arrived and it was time to start learning shit. Since this was the COVID-19 pandemic, there would be no exams. All lessons would be delivered via video calls and we would be assessed on coursework such as school projects and weekly assignments. Another small mercy, because the biggest pain in the ass I remember from past experience was all the traveling to and from school and office. Now with strict lockdowns imposed due to the pandemic, no more of this crap!
Learning Python
The first term started fairly simple. It involved one of my favorite activities - learning a new programming language. This language was Python, and while I had dabbled with it in the past, now I had actual professional guidance. On my MacBook, I installed Jupyter and that was my IDE. |
| Programming in Python. |
Of course, we had to deal with the usual basic stuff like operators, logic blocks and iteration. But once we got past that, wow, Python's data structures were really something. I'm talking lists, arrays, dictionaries, series, datasets, the works. And at the end of it, by the time we got to HTML scraping using Python libraries, I was convinced. Python is some seriously good shit.
Not having to hunt for missing semi-colons and do curly brackets, was a nice change. It didn't even bother me too much that Python insists on proper indentation - I do that all the time anyway. Generally, just in terms of syntax alone, Python gave me almost as much pleasure as Ruby.
Learning Data Visualization
As mentioned earlier, Data Visualization was one of the areas I was looking to expand on. My instructors went one better - they delved into storytelling. I had expected maybe a little bit of D3 or some frontend code or other. Instead, I was given Data Visualization software to work with. |
| Dashboards and storytelling. |
This was Tableau Desktop, and it made my work a whole lot easier, especially when you consider that it wasn't just Data Visualization, there was also the storytelling part I had to contend with. I was also shown a whole new world of storytelling with regard to data - how other people did it, and all the fascinating examples of how one could visually represent data to present a narrative.
There was plenty more to the science of storytelling, but all that can be explored at another time.
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