10/12/2018 – A confused October sunrise in Minnesota – snow, leaves, open water
As I described in https://lakedatainsights.com/2018/09/03/welcome-to-lake-data-insights/ , this blog will be (mostly) about data science. Before moving onto some selected topics in the field, I want to spend some time talking about my journey to data science.
Let’s start with a common definition for this relatively new field… that doesn’t have a good common definition. My favorite definition is the following from Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight, by John W. Foreman (http://www.john-foreman.com/data-smart-book.htm). What I like about it is the end goal of data science – insights, decisions, and products.
“Data science is the transformation of data using mathematics and statistics into valuable insights, decisions, and products”
My journey towards data science started back in 2014 when I first started hearing about this “new” field. This was a year or so after a Harvard Business Review article had declared data science “the sexiest job of the 21st century” (https://hbr.org/2012/10/data-scientist-the-sexiest-job-of-the-21st-century). I was immediately drawn to it. Any personality or strengths test I’ve ever done emphasizes my analytical nature. I enjoy searching for reasons and causes, and I think decisions should be made based on facts. I’m a numbers nerd… I like statistics classes, collect and record data from most of my workouts (how does one know he’s tired if his heart rate monitor doesn’t tell him so???), and my favorite hobby is the season-long pursuit of strikeouts, homeruns, and other stats while playing fantasy baseball.
The interest was there. And so was the need. We were moving our Microsoft Dynamics product to the cloud where we would go from almost no data coming from the use of the product to a fire hose of data coming in. Having just moved from an engineering manager role back to an architect role, it was also a good time to learn some new skills.
One of the first steps in the journey was to build a quarterly learning plan where each quarter had a learning objective and a few tasks. The plan included some reading (see Foreman’s book above, for one), some on-line training, and some on-the-job projects. The learning plan was a good way to start the journey, and my next post will provide some details of one aspect of the plan – leveraging MOOC’s (massively open online courses).