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Showing posts from January, 2018

Post-Script to the Purpose of this Blog

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I said in my first post that I have this blog in the hope that it is useful to other people just starting to learn DataScience. This is not really to whole truth. The other reason, and perhaps more importantly, is that you learn so much from trying to explain things to other people. Who was it that said that you don't really understand something unless you can explain it to a five-year-old? Was it Feynman? That's really what I'm doing here. Making sure that I really understand the concepts and techniques that I'm learning and not just storming through course after course and book after book without the real end-goal in mind: become a better data scientist.

Purpose Of This Blog

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I am a 38 year old Cell Biologist/Microscopist. I have done basic scientific research since ~2002, starting with my PhD project in The Netherlands for 5 years and as PostDoc and Senior Scientist in Denmark for the last 10. Ever since my PhD I've been interested in machine learning, but I used to think it was too hard for someone without any programming background. Since I didn't see any direct use for ML in my research projects I couldn't justify learning about it at work, and I didn't have/take the time to do it at home either. About two years ago something changed. I'm not exactly sure what caused it, but I decided to learn to code. I found a fantastic website called 'freeCodeCamp.org' and proceeded to blast through the exercises and modules until about halfway through the back end development certification part. By now I had done tons of javascript algorithm exercises and created a bunch of projects (hosted on https://codepen.io/chrisdinant/ ) a