5 Projects in 2022 to Get Started in the World of Data and Impress Potential Employers
A comprehensive list of small projects that I think will keep you in the 2022 trend for beginners looking into dipping their toes in the field of data
A new year is coming and perhaps learning a new skill or getting a new job is on your checklist. Fear not as we will be looking into 5 projects in no particular order I think will help you learn and impress your potential employers.
Beginners can start with using data exported in CSV or Excel and slowly increase your difficulty to automatically grab data via API or web scrappers.
Magic portal:
- Energy consumption / Sustainability
- Online Shopping / E-commerce
- Cryptocurrency
- Healthcare
- Your portfolio website / Google Analytics
- So…
Energy consumption / Sustainability
If you have been following the news for some time, you would've heard the term “carbon-neutral”. For those who have not, I encourage you to read up on it and understand what companies are doing to be carbon-neutral. While the big companies are doing their part, you could be doing your part too with some data analysis on your household energy consumption.
If you have smart meters or smart switches that measure your energy consumptions, you can always build a simple dashboard that has your consumption by days, weeks, and even months. Understanding your electricity usage pattern and what is drawing the most power helps you optimize your bill, indirectly helping the environment. Make a story using a dashboard on seasonal electricity consumption, whether the increase of electricity usage during winter due to the heaters being on most of the time or the constant air conditioning during a hot summer. These stats brings the beauty out of your data. Even without a smart meter or switch, you could still compile your monthly bills and usage into a spreadsheet.
Online shopping / E-commerce
During the Covid outbreak, online shopping based on an Amazon blog post here (October 27, 2021) has seen an increase in 2020 alone, with constant growth every year. Another report by Daniela Copolla at statista.com (October 27, 2021) indicated the growth of e-commerce shopping over the years too.
We know that companies have been busy mining whatever is in our shopping carts and purchase history, making sense out of it and enticing us to buy more. But do you know what is your shopping pattern, do you have a special purchase period once your payslip is released? Depending on your favorite e-commerce website, there should be ways to extract your data, from Amazon’s Order History Report to creating a Chrome extension that crawls your order history page into an exportable format such as CSV or even JSON. Get your data, or even get it from your family members and do some visualizations!
To give you some inspiration, I created a website to distinguish useful and useless reviews from an e-commerce platform called Shopee in Malaysia.
Website: https://reviewnator.jonathanlawhh.com/
See a towel review here.
Blog post coming soon!
Cryptocurrency
Not the way the internet wants you to think and force the mindset of investing into you, but with the increase in trend and countries adopting it, we as people working with data should harvest it while it is coming in hot. There are many cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Etheruem, Dogecoin, etc and more being added constantly. Being on the internet does not make it easier too, as there is a split opinion between the benefits of adopting cryptocurrencies.
However, there are a plethora of new things we can do with the available data from forums, blogs, and even social media. There are already plenty of people doing cryptocurrencies forecasts, trends of highs and lows, so we will just do something else. Sentiment analysis that identifies whether a thread has the majority of people agreeing with the adoption of cryptocurrency, or they are against it, the hot keywords using word clouds, what are the top currencies that people are constantly talking about, is there an emerging talk of a new currency.
*I would like to highlight that you should not dismiss information you discovered just because it goes against your opinions. Topics and discussions about cryptocurrency in forums can be toxic and biased. Remember that data about people's comments are just opinions like yours and no one is wrong, and dismissing valid data is just bias which is not ideal in this field of work.
Healthcare
Any advancement in the field of healthcare is a big leap for mankind. While healthcare sounds like an intimidating project for a beginner, it is not impossible to get started. Healthcare scope is not only limited to cancers, heart attacks, or blood tests data but medicines, nursing/nurses, and even pharmacy fall under the field of healthcare. Searching online you would've found much research using AI and data to identify cancer cells, predict a heart attack based on your pulse, and even genome sequencing clustering.
Take a step back, and understand that healthcare is everywhere. How long are you sitting every day, how often do you exercise, are you lifting your weights properly. Dive deeper into identifying people suffering from mental health based on certain indications, research and soon enough you may get a chance to work with professionals in implementing your solutions!
During the start of Covid, I realized my sitting posture has declined and I created a model to inform me. At that time I was no expert in data or healthcare, but talking to many people and trying relentlessly got me to finally produce a working prototype! Here is my prototype for you to try out and hopefully inspire you:
prototype: https://posture.jonathanlawhh.com/
blog post: https://jonathanlawhh.medium.com/sitting-posture-identifier-using-ai-11b96f8a8da8
Your portfolio website
Before you give up and think that this is all about software development, it is not. You can quickly build a website with free website builders out there, or templates that can be easily used. However, your focus would be implementing Google Analytics, which is easy to set up.
Helping a company understand what drives a person into their website, how often do they revisit, what page has the longest view time, and a user's retention or bounce rate is a valuable skill that companies want regardless if it’s 2012 or 2022. What better way to get started than to implement it on your website, showcase your other projects and share your website links around. Using the Google Analytics dashboard and understanding where recruiters or employers are clicking onto your profile and which page interests them more helps you improve your website, and at the same time add Google Analytics onto your CV.
Here is my personal website that might inspire you!
So…
These are the few projects that I would recommend to anyone trying to dip their toes in data in 2022. And even if you are not interested in any of these projects, find something that you truly enjoy and I trust you will succeed and enjoy the process if you are passionate enough.
All the best and may the new year be kind to us!
