Today is the first official day of Unit 3. (Yesterday was Labor Day which we technically had off but still had a lecture video to watch and an assignment to complete. Lambda’s schedule waits for no one and nothing!) Two months on the runaway freight train and I’m still wondering where its taking me. It was also troubling to find out news over the weekend about Lambda’s legal troubles in California. I took a leap of faith and left my job for this. I had been looking at getting in the data science field for several years (to my shame) but the one-two punch of Lambda’s ISA and the increasingly poor atmosphere at my previous employer. It seemed like the right time. Did I make a mistake? With the talk about a looming downturn in the economy, did I shoot myself in the foot? Time will tall.
Last week was our first build week. This meant that the normal schedule was suspended to allow for dedicated work in the unit 2 predictive modeling project. One thing that was better was I found an acceptable dataset earlier on. In Unit 1 I thought I had to be much more enthusiastic about the data in part because I thought each successive unit would build on the same work done previously. Knowing that wasn’t the case made unit 2 easier to some extent. My project was on predicting a car’s fuel economy based on past data. It was OK. The dataset which initially looked feature-rich turned out to be somewhat lacking. While I think I did well on the technical side of things (coding the models, delivering a webapp), I still fell short on the visualizations. I could decide to go in a data science direction which doesn’t lean too much on viz but my nature is to focus on the shortcomings so for now at least I can’t let it go and must get better in that area.