Data scientists are magicians. You give them data, they turn them into stories. Visuals included.

A crucial part of my journey to becoming a Pythonista for data science is meeting new friends called Python libraries. A library is a collection of powerful scripts that can make your work a lot easier. There are libraries for general purposes and there are libraries for more specific needs. Each library is downloaded as a package and is imported into the script so we can call it and use its contents in our program.

Preparing the Story Outline

The library called pandas is a Python package that provides data structures and is useful for structured and time-series data. It mainly works with Series (for 1 dimension) and DataFrames (for 2 dimensions). Using pandas is quite efficient in the initial analysis of our data. …

It’s my first Python 3 project!

Just like hiking a mountain for the first time, creating your first Python program can seem like a difficult uphill. There’s this feeling of uncertainty as to whether your current knowledge and skills are enough to be able to complete it. There may also be this doubt if you can even start making one!

As a budding Pythonista, I knew that I have to take the first few steps. I did. And it’s not without difficulties. In the end, I was able to climb a bit and I am starting to enjoy the view!

Creating the Basic Quiz

I am also into astronomy so I decided to write a quiz about planets in the Solar System. I called the game the “Solar System Quiz 2020”. I wrote the basic quiz on a single .py …

Sharing some thoughts on these two related fields.

The relevance of statistics in the field of data science.

Statistics is an established field that describes and analyzes data. Data science may be a relatively new field but it is quite similar to statistics that it also looks at patterns and trends of properties that we know about a sample or a population.

Trends and patterns are used to tell a story — this is how we communicate any findings to our audience. Some statistical tools and methods are applied in data science to be able to generate descriptions and predictions about the data.

Discuss the importance of data preparation before data analysis.

Data needs to be explored to be able to find out how we can analyze it to give the insights we need. The whole experience of data analysis is determined by the quality of the data that we have. …

Starting out this series to document my adventures in learning the language.

Python, being an elegant language, is fantastic in itself. It’s an interpreted language that is widely used in different fields. Its syntax is high-level enough so we can focus more on solving problems rather than getting engulfed by so many rules.

As part of my adventures in exploring Python as a data science tool, it’s a great exercise to create simple projects where some concepts are directly applied. What could be more fun than creating games!

I was first exposed to Python a little over a year ago when I created a short visual novel game using a Python-based game engine. It was quite different from what I’m doing now as first, it was still using Python 2; and second, the game engine has an impressive library of functions and other objects which made coding it a lot easier. I got hooked on the storyline and game logic. And that’s the beauty of Python. It allows you to focus on what you really wanted to do. …

Ever written a document which you thought was the final version, but you knew that there would always be a “more final” version? Yeah, we can all relate…

From our high school essays to research papers in the university, we, at some point in our lives, have faced the challenge of having to keep track of different versions of our own work. Working on a collaboration with other people can turn this into a nightmare!

Among developers, tracking the versions and documenting the progress of a project has to be accurate and can be updated in real-time. …

A python, an anaconda, and a spider walked into a terminal…

It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but the real form is this:

Python, Anaconda, and Spyder walked into a terminal. Yep, they still sound like jungle critters you wouldn’t want to be found at any transportation terminal. The terminal that I’m referring to, however, is the Linux terminal emulator. For the Windows users among you, it would refer to the cmd or command prompt.

I’ve been a Linux user since 2003. The old Ubuntu (remember its pre-aubergine days?) was widely used in public computers at my university back then. Even computer rental shops had some units using Ubuntu. I was not an exclusive Linux user until in the past five years. I knew that I needed to use Windows for specific applications (ahem, games) and I used OSX when I worked in advertising. Right now, I’m using the latest version of Linux Mint (Ulyana) for productive work, in dual boot with a random Linux distribution (“distro”, as we fondly call them) I can mercilessly tinker with and change at any time. …