7 Days until the Start of the End

Another personal update!

I have 7-days left of my month long “vacation” from school.  This is the start of the end of my Harvard Extension School – Front-end Web Development certificate.  I will take a class that perfectly sums my last year: 50% Data Science and 50% web development.  The class is called: building interactive Web Applications for Data Science.  I’m concurrently working towards a Masters in Analytics at Georgia Tech, which will become the main focus afterwards.

What I’ve built so far!

CSCI E-12 – Fundamentals of Website Development:

1. The final project combined flexbox, media queries, jquery/javascript and light boxes.  I had to do some wire-framing and learn a bit about UX.

CSCI E-33A – Web Programming with Python and JavaScript: 

1. Pokemon Listing website  – pokemon list and coding documentation containing basic HTML, CSS, SCSS and JavaScript
2. Bookstore with Search:  Book listing for book store with search done in a mix of SQL, Flask and HTML/CSS.
3. Slack Clone (Chat): Chat messenger that looks exactly like Slack using a mix of Flask and socket.io.
4. Pizza Shop – E-commerce: This is a Pizza shop application with a shopping cart built with a mix of Django and Django forms.
5. Property Management App: This is a property management app.  Search houses in Zillow, add them to your properties and watch monthly mortgage payments/interest auto-calculated including payment schedule.  Built using Django and calling Zillow API.

CSCI E-31 – Web Application Development using Node.js

1. Task Tracking Application: this was incrementally built starting with a static Express application in Node.js, adding MongoDB as the data source, restful apis for task data and finally converting the front-end to use Angular.js.

What’s Next?

building interactive Web Applications for Data Science combines my interest in Data Science and Data Analytics with recent skills I’ve acquired in web development.  The class focuses on Flask deployed to AWS via Docker.  It requires the student to build Machine Learning models and use D3.js that interact with the Web Application.  This should be interesting.

This ties into 2 other classes I’ve taken at Georgia Tech: CSE – 6040 – Intro to Computing for Data Analysis and ISYE 6501 – Intro to Analytics Modeling.  First class explores Python, Pandas, Numpy and Machine Learning implementation.  Later focuses on analytics techniques and introduces around a dozen different type of models.  6501 coding in R.

Fall Term!

Fall term is approaching.  I will be focusing exclusively on my Masters of Analytics outside of work.  Two courses I will be taking: Data Visual Analytics and Simulations.  The former involves a survey of different data-related technologies: Python, D3.js, Spark/Hadoop, SQL-databases.  The later is theoretical with a focus more on the math.  It involves building a few simulations in Arena and Python.  The Data Visual Analytics course is renown for being time-intensive and difficult.  More so, those with little programming experience.

Other Technologies!

Typically, I don’t talk much about things outside of class!  That said, I did get to pick up and implement docker within a codebuild environment.  Build a continuous integration and development system.  That was pretty cool.  I’ve also been reading up on new data technologies: Spark, Presto etc.  During my 1-month break have implemented a Spark cluster on an EC2 instance that contains Jupyter and used my “micro” cluster to try out Spark’s official Machine Learning documentation.  I’ve been wanting to try it out.

Overall, I’m personally trying to push myself towards trying new things out.  Just implementing more things from scratch.  It’s part of stretching some of my new found skills in Linux Administration gained over the last few years.  Also a general interest in learning more about Devops technologies on the side.

Always stay true to yourself and explore this world!  Life is to short to wait for it to pass you by!

Best,

Chris