Spoiler alert: It was surprisingly easy (and free) to make — Getting a Data Scientist job is hard. This isn’t 2015 anymore: it’s not enough to know a few pandas functions and put the words “Big Data” on your résumé. Competition for the top jobs is fierce. On a recent trawl through the LinkedIn jobs board, I struggled to find a…

No, I don’t just ask ChatGPT to tell me — Data Science moves fast. Like, really fast. Five years ago, if you said you were interested in AI that roughly translated to something between having a PhD in Quantum Mathematics and having an “I heart π” tattoo plastered across your back. Now my mum sends me ChatGPT memes and you…

Many of the world’s top companies have started hiring Decision Scientists. Is this the quiet beginning of a new era? — What if I told you that some of the most famous Data Scientists in the world aren’t actually Data Scientists? Take Cassie Kozyrkov, for example. Cassie used to be Chief Data Scientist at Google, but for the last 5 years has been working as Google’s Chief Decision Scientist. Or take…

Custom keyboard shortcuts, highlighting text, and more — Despite their popularity amongst users of R, Python and Julia, Jupyter Notebooks are rarely used to their full potential. Most users know the basic commands (execute code, comment, save, etc.), but few make use of Jupyter’s hidden tricks — even though these can save significant time and effort. Since 2019…

Hint: start with the free stuff — If you want to learn a new skill in Data Science, it can be really tough to decide which course to take. When I was looking for my first online Data Science coding course in 2019, I couldn’t get over this feeling of analysis paralysis and I spent way too…

Gradio is a surefire way to impress both technical and non-technical stakeholders — Why aren’t more Data Scientists and MLEs using it? — PowerPoint presentations suck. At least, bad ones do. Bad PowerPoints create distracted audiences (who turn off their cameras and multitask), and they make it easy for presenters to get away with bad habits like using too much technical jargon and waffling on for too long.

What those kindergarteners can teach us about project management, and the unexpected impact of a $10,000 incentive — Picture the scene. You’re given 18 minutes to build a tower using only 20 pieces of uncooked spaghetti, a yard of string and some tape. The aim is to build a tower that can hold the weight of a marshmallow. How tall can you go? This was the question posed…

Writing online: It’s easy to get started, great for building communication skills, and more sustainable than a traditional data science portfolio — Portfolios and LinkedIn profiles will only get you so far in your career as a Data Scientist. Sure — LinkedIn is a great way to build a professional network, and portfolios provide a great way to showcase the cool stuff you’ve done. But if no one clicks on your portfolio…

Bored of Kaggle and FiveThirtyEight? Here are the alternative strategies I use for getting high-quality and unique datasets — The key to a great data science project is a great dataset, but finding great data is much easier said than done. I remember back when I was studying for my master’s in Data Science, a little over a year ago. Throughout the course, I found that coming up with…