DataTalksClub Machine Learning Zoomcamp — My journey into data — Part#01

While working as an environmental engineer I had been confronted with many numerical challenges. The craft requires a lot of effort on doing the write thing, and in order to perform it correctly you have to work hard on math, stats, and numeric analysis.

Though I have always enjoyed Calculus and Algebra, I must confess I wasn’t much in love with numerical calculus ou any programming. Coding with C++ and Fortran seemed laborious and little necessary. I coundn’t be more wrong, however, the shift only came more than 10 years after I finished my bachalors degree.

In post-grad I had to deal with a numerical challenge to obtain my master’s degree. At first excruciating, it turned out to become a clever way of working with models and data. I had a tortuous path, but eventually I begun to enjoy coding.

Then, a shifted roles and jobs until I realized I could be a good project manager. Skills such as communication, organization, discipline, and reasoning, which I learned as an engineer, spurred me into this new role almost naturally. Despite that, hard skills such coding would be most important, at least to the level of understaing the hurdles the development team went through.

So I decide to get into the new age of data and learn Python, a bit of R, and SQL. It was scary at first and quite frankly every time I have to learn something new I still get frightened, but none of this stops anymore. Something in my mind just changed so profoundly that I do not cogitate giving up. I must say, the feeling of unreveling new knowledge and comprehending the mechanics of data analysis gets me excited!

I already had watched youtube videos on the subject of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. I even took a 70 hours long Python course the culminated with an introduction to ML, however, this time I found gold. Data Talks Club is a plataform where one can find indispensable articles about data and free courses. I am enrolled into Machine Learning Zoomcamp 2024 and I will share here my experience.

The first homework was familiar. I handled algebraic calculations with pandas and numpy. It was fun and brough me back to my undergrad years. Now, I can not think of a better way of calculating inverse matrixes or solving linear systems. The native methods are just so simple that any scondary student could use too.

You can check the problems and answers on my GitHub page.

See you soon!