What I've Learned So Far
This week a new cohort of students started in the DAND. It got me thinking about what I've done in the last month. I'm a big fan of the value of taking stock and pausing to reflect on where you have come from, because if you don't, sometimes you miss it. So, this is what I've done in the last month.
- Examined some of the global temperature trends and the relationship to Canadian cities. With this I learnt:
- How to use SQL to filter a database and retrieve a csv file
- What a moving average is
- How to use the LINEST function in Excel
- That there is a bunch of stats information stored somewhere in my brain :P
- Examined some US bikeshare data. With this I learnt:
- So much more about Python! I still feel like I'm a beginner, but I'm much more comfortable reading and writing with Python
- Googling everything is your friend!! There are SO many online resources on almost everything to do with coding and they are always a great starting place
- How to read documentation and stack overflow comments. I feel I am STILL learning how to do this, but it was a task in and of itself!
- How to use Slack! (It's pretty similar to Discord, but still had never used it)
- That other students in my Slack community are also excellent sources of help!
- Learnt how to properly use GitHub. With this I learnt:
- To be more comfortable using the command line to do things
- What Git actually is
- How to correctly make commits, what branches are, what push means, and how pull requests actually function
- That working in Git and then pushing to GitHub is much easier than trying to do everything in GitHub
- How to fork a repo and make use of it!
- Started my brush up of linear algebra. With this I learnt:
- That there is this information floating around in my head
- That I now have an answer to the many times we questioned our teachers on when we would ever use the things we learnt in Maths B, C and Physics!
- How to use Jupyter Notebooks, of which I have become a pretty big fan
- How to use Markdown and LaTex
- That I feel just a bit satisfied when I CAN actually code all of these functions to get the correct results
- Made a website (this one!). And with this, goodness I've learnt a tonne:
- How to get a website to actually show up from my GitHub repo
- Even though Jekyll exists, I prefer using html to write my website because I find more resources for it
- How to still find functionality that is specific to Jekyll when it is helpful
- A WHOLE BUNCH about how to use html - the most I'd done before was to change some links on a website
- File names with spaces in them are horrible things, especially when you can't change the file name, I'm looking at you Microsoft account user name!
It's been an incredible journey to date, and I'm looking forward to learning more!
