Hi reader and welcome to my first blog post!
I want to reminiscent my journey to the Data School which, in a nutshell, began with a 20 minute chat at a job fair. But let me backtrack and tell the story in a longer and hopefully inspiring way. My journey began with an interest in Data Science, but I quickly realized that my university's offerings were limited. The only interesting coding-related course available was a basic Python introduction for economics, which barely scratched the surface of what I wanted to learn. Knowing I wouldn’t get far, I began looking for other opportunities to learn.
This drive led me to my first part-time coding bootcamp in Data Science at TechLabs Hamburg, where I learned to clean, enrich, merge, analyze, and visualize data in an interactive, explorative dashboard written entirely in Python. I also got to use tools that an actual Data Scientist uses. Working hands-on with data, going through many struggles and learning experiences over six months, and having a tangible product as a result made me realize that I wanted to continue doing that. Which led me to the Data School in a job fair. During my talk with a nice Data Schooler I was immediately convinced by the program and excited to build my first Tableau dashboard for my application. Building a dashboard, especially with my previous experience, sounds doable right?
Sitting down and trying this “Tableau”, my brain broke. It was already challenging to get the data pieced together, since from a Python perspective I couldn’t understand the difference between merge/join and relationships of multiple datasets. What is a logical and physical layer? How can I save my joined data as file before I continue to work on it? Without getting the data in a right way to load, the following analysis is for the trash. Other things like: why does the pie chart not show up like I wanted, how can the linechart look so weird like this? What are containers and why do they shift so weird and destroy my whole layout? Struggling and wasting so much time was frustrating.
Having only one week left to submit my improved dashbaord, I fully removed my Python logic and past dashboard experience and deep dived into Tableau. I have to say I was already impressed that you can build a dashbaord with just Python but building dashbaord in Tableau with all its features blew me away, it is much more intuitive. In conclusion: for data visualization Tableau is much better than Python! (Edit: Tableau Prep for data preperation is much cooler too) And so after going through a lot of trial and error for a week, I improved significantly and I was invited to the first interview round and the rest is history.
In conclusion spending those 20 minutes at the job fair changed my life and brought me to this wonderful community of data enthusiasts. I hope the short time you will spend on my blog page will inspire you to get out and spend 20 minutes doing something that might change your life as well.