Free, Useful Services for Data Scientists and Hobbyists
At-home projects should be free, here’s how.
The ROI for a hobbyist is rarely measured in dollar bills. Instead, people start hobby projects because they’re interested; maybe to learn, maybe for fun, maybe to build a PoC for an idea which could eventually yield riches.
Consequently, people are generally unwilling to pay for services to get their hobby projects up and running. At least, I sure am. Recently, I built a web scraper with GitHub Actions that would run every hour, dropping the data in a Google Sheets workbook, and sending me a Telegram message summarising the scrape job. All free.
With all that being said, here’s a collated list of free services to get you started with some hobby projects. Some for data scientists, all for people interested in building something.
Google Colaboratory
Need to train a large neural network but don’t have the local compute power, and don’t want to pay for a pricey GPU cloud instance? Try Colaboratory, Google’s free cloud service for AI developers.
It’s effectively a wrapper around Jupyter Notebook; the differences are that it’s hosted and saved in the Google cloud, it allows collaboration, it offers free GPU and TPU support, and it comes with…
