My weekly accountability report for my self-study approach to learning data science.
Shhhh. I skipped last week. Don't tell on me, ok?
Where am I at?
- The biggest thing is participating in Full Stack Deep Learning. This was a 2-day boot camp in Berekely. It was intense in a good way and an uncomfortable way. It some ways it was straight forward. Show up, listen, learn and network. But it was a stretch for me (I'm noticing this is a pattern) but I ultimately decided that it was a good one. I met a bunch of nice people and I'm looking forward to putting all the things I learned in to practice. I think it would help me a lot to share what I've learned, so I might try as I'm working through the labs and studying to pick out some highlights from many of the lectures and blog about it.
It was great because it covered things that I might get in bits and pieces if I'm paying attention to blog posts and tweets. But the advantage of curriculum-based instruction is relying on someone else's expertise of what is relevant to learn. Self-taught you have to make sure you trust your teachers. But the instructors (Pieter Abbeel, Josh Tobin, and Sergey Karayev) were fabulous and the bread and depth of knowledge were excellent.
Besides the lectures and labs, one of the features of the boot camp is the ability to take an exam and if you score high enough to access the recruiter network. You have a month and can take the test multiple times. That being said, I haven't looked at the questions yet and I'm not sure if I'll pass. Ultimately I think it's a great idea and there is no penalty for failing. It's not like the time I spend studying for it or taking it will be wasted time.
- My other studies weren't terribly focused last week. Freelancing was good. I'm getting to flex my SQL skills and am playing around with some NLP libraries. In general, both the boot camp and the work I'm doing are making me very aware of the way in which engineering with data and the probabilistic nature of it is quite different from traditional software engineering. And that's requiring an adjustment.
- Finally, does anyone have any suggestions on how to write blog posts quicker. Or should I just keep carving out more time than I think I should for this?
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