Tag: advice

Recently, I received an email from a pharmacist who considers becoming a data scientist. Since this is not a first (or last) similar email that I receive, I think others will find this message exchange interesting.

Compiled by my teammate Yanir Serourssi, the following is a reading list an A/B tests that you should read even if you don’t plan to perform an A/B test anytime soon. The list is Yanir’s. The reviews are mine. Collective intelligence in action :-)

I really recommend reading this (longish) post by Tom Breur called “Data Dredging” (and following his blog. The post is dedicated to overfitting – the most scaring problem in machine learning. Overfitting is easy to do and is hard to avoid. It is a serious problem when working with “small data” but is also a problem in the big data era. Read “Data Dredging” for an overview of the problem and its possible cures.

Recently, I gave a data science career advice, in which I suggested the perspective data scientists not to study data science as a career move. Two of my main arguments were (and still are):

Today, I’ve read a tweet by Sinan Aral (@sinanaral) from the MIT:

If you know me in person or follow my blog, you know that I have a keen interest in teaching. Indeed, besides being a full-time data scientist at Automattic, I teach data visualization anywhere I can. Since I started teaching, I became much better in communication, which is one of the required skills of a good data scientist.
In my constant strive for improving what I do, I joined the Data Carpentry instructor training. Recently, I got my certification as a data carpentry instructor.

It’s hard to overestimate how I adore StackOverflow. One of the recent blog posts on StackOverflow.blog is “What you need to know to start a career as a data scientist” by Julia Silge. Here are my reservations about that post:

Almost half a year ago, I decided to create an online data visualization course. After investing hundreds of hours, I managed to release the first lecture and record another one. However, I decided not to publish new lectures and to remove the existing one from the net. Why? The short answer is a huge cost-to-benefit ratio. For a longer answer, you will have to keep reading this post.

March 2019: Two years after the completion of this post I wrote a follow-up. Read it here.