Day 1 started at a sprint. I was expecting to spend some time getting our environments up to speed, so I had not set up my MacBook yet. That was a mistake.
We were programming right away with an assessment. I did not have a solid dev environment and wasted time installing modules, looking up syntax, etc. Come to class ready to rock.
The rest of the week went a lot smoother. OO and SQL were good reviews. Lectures although fast-pace have been well organized. The daily exercises were challenging even for someone coming from a software background, so I am particularly impressed by the students have come in with no programming experience.
The rest of the week was all about building out the data science toolkit: iPython notebook, pandas, EDA, Unix, graphing.
The EDA exercise was fun. The lectured covered a process for EDA which really helped to squeeze as much value out of a data set as possible. My partner and I worked on a 311 calls data set which was almost entirely categorical data. It was a good exercise figuring out how to extract numerical data and thinking of good business questions to answer.
An intense, but satisfying first week.
A few tips... Don't register at the last minute like me. Make sure to get pre-course materials. These are worth working through before starting the bootcamp.
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