Drinking from the Firehose

The past week of unemployment has been a whirlwind of activity and emotion. Google became my best friend as I started diving into topics I’m not very familiar with. This blog post will be a high level overview of everything I’ve accomplished so far.

Laptop

The first major thing to do was replace my aging laptop and set it up to be my development environment by installing important applications.

I’ve been happy with Apple products in the past, and the OS X operating system is based on Unix, so I decided to go with the latest Macbook. It’s only 2lbs, has a retina screen and up to 9 hours of battery life. So far, I’m a fan. Keep scrolling to the bottom for a list of the applications I downloaded.

Accounts

Once I mentally committed myself to this project, I knew I would blog about it. I want my journey to be useful and meaningful to others - there would be nothing cooler than convincing those in similar positions to finally take the leap. I suppose not everyone can quit their job, but maybe read a programing book you’ve been meaning to or complete a part-time online class.

To reach people beyond my immediate network I set up many new accounts, such as this Medium blog, Twitter , and GitHub. I also updated my LinkedIn.

Website

I wanted to set up my own website, so I bought a domain and hosting through Namecheap and set up a simple website and a redirection for the blog.zareenfarooqui.com subdomain. This is all new to me, so it’s pretty basic now, but will be updated as I learn more about web development.

Python

My main focus has been learning Python. So far, I read over half of the HTTLACS (How To Think Like a Computer Scientist) book, created this syntax guide notebook in Jupyter for future reference, and watched 3 weeks of Introduction to Computer Science and Programming using Python (I’m using these lectures as supplements to the reading). My next step is to start working on my first project. More on that below.

Amazon Web Services

I learned how to launch a server in Amazon Web Services and how to write and run Python code there. For now, I’m using the free tier of an EC2 instance. I haven’t decided exactly how I will be incorporating this into my projects, but felt this would be interesting to learn for two reasons. 1) It allows me to run Python code on regular intervals (like every hour) even if my laptop is shut off. 2) I can use it to host websites. I’ll probably write a detailed blog post in the future about how to set this up.

Project Work

One piece of advice I’ve repeatedly heard is to reinforce what I’m learning through projects I can show off in a portfolio (like Github). I haven’t started on my first real project yet, but have been researching free data sets online to figure out what I want to work on.

Right now, I’m planning to use Facebook data for some sort of statistical analysis. Why Facebook? I want to be a data analyst and Facebook has perhaps the largest collection of social data in the world. I’ve been playing with Facebook’s Graph API to familiarize myself with its capabilities. Once I’m done learning Python fundamentals, I’ll really start working on this.

Networking

Luckily for me, Boston has a thriving technical community. I joined meetup.com groups for several topics I want to learn and am amazed at all the options available. This week I’m going to a meetup on text analysis with R, Python and Spark to prepare for a special project in NYC next week (stay tuned!). I signed up for mock interviews, beginner coding meetups, and events on specific subjects like an Intro to Github.

To make sure I’m preparing myself for my job search in the future, I’ve been setting up informational interviews with recruiters at companies I might want to work for. The goal here is to learn about the types of projects their analytics teams work on, the technology they’re using, the average day-to-day experience, and the office culture. I’ll be contacting the recruiters again once I feel ready to formally apply.

I’ve also been reaching out to friends and old classmates who work in the industry to have casual conversations about their work experiences. I ask them what they love about their current job/company and what types of opportunities are next in their career trajectory.

Command Line

I started learning basic Mac OS X command line syntax on terminal. I’ve been using commands like pwd, cd, ls, mkdir, cp, mv.

Finally, below is a list of all the applications I set up on my MacBook:

Applications I would recommend even if you’re not a programmer:

• AppCleaner 3.2.1: completely uninstalls unwanted apps on a Mac
• Dropbox: file hosting service, I pay $99/year for 1 TB of storage
• f.lux: adujsts your computer screen colors to the time of day
• iStat Menus: Mac system monitoring for menubar
• Prey: theft protection software, make sure you have a guest account that anyone can use that does not have access to your personal account files
• Spotify: digital music service, I pay $9.99/month for no ads
• Skype: video calls
• The unarchiver: more robust unarchiver than the Mac default
• uTorrent: a desktop application used to download files via BitTorrent
• VLC: multimedia player
• Chrome: web browser

Three Chrome Extensions:

• HTTPS Everywhere: automatically switches sites from insecure “http” to secure “https”
• Privacy Badger: protects you from trackers as you browse the web
• uBlock Origin: content filtering + ad blocking

Programming Applications:

• Activetcl: this was just required for Python (open source Tcl programming language)
• Cyberduck: open source client for interacting with files via FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, OpenStack Swift , and Amazon S3
• Jupyter: a browser based notebook web application which allows you to write code, see its results and do visualization in Python
• Python IDLE: Integrated Development Environment for Python
• Sublime Text: programming text editor