It takes a healthy combination of skills to excel in this interdisciplinary field — “I really want to get into data science.” This is a phrase thrown around pretty loosely these days. Around every corner, there’s another person who emphatically insists that they want to learn the skills necessary to become a data scientist. …

Simple but effective methods to stop overthinking and start living. — Ever since I hit adolescence, I’ve been troubled by anxiety in one form or another. I can’t pinpoint the moment it began. I just know that at some point, the sense of calm and freedom of my childhood was replaced with constant unease and worry. For a long time, it…

Along with all those other negative feelings you have to deal with. — Partway through college, I fell victim to a bout of severe anxiety that lasted several months. I’d always been prone to some level of anxious feelings, but this was something else entirely. At times, I experienced complete mental paralysis with what felt like actual physical pain. It wasn’t pleasant. I…

A dive into filtering, manipulating, and functioning — Think back to the last time you worked with a nicely formatted data set. Well-named columns, minimal missing values, and proper organization. It’s a nice feeling — almost freeing — to be blessed with data that you don’t need to clean and transform. Well, it’s nice until you snap out…

Tips and tricks for being productive on your worst days. — Motivation: It’s a word thrown around pretty loosely these days. There’s no dearth of speakers, writers, and influencers out there ready to build you up with words of wisdom and energy. Promising to help you find that spark in your daily routine that just isn’t there right now. And while…

Learn the difference between long-form and wide-form data, and how to transition between them in Pandas — It’s a well-known fact among data scientists: your data will never be exactly the way you want it. You might get a somewhat organized spreadsheet or reasonable sensible tables, but there will always be some cleaning up to do before you’re ready for analysis. As a result, it’s crucial to…

Planning out your code matters a lot more than you think. — If you’re an avid Python user, you may be familiar with the famous poem, “The Zen of Python.” It was written by Tim Peters (one of the original developers of the language), and can be read in its entirety by typing the command import this into the Python interpreter. I…

Take advantage of easy-to-implement lessons from one of the language’s most knowledgeable experts — You may not know it, but a Python installation comes with a wonderful and helpful poem, free of charge. To access it, all you need do is type import this into the terminal. You’ll then be greeted with the following: “The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters Beautiful is better…

Profound lessons from ‘The Name of The Wind’ by Patrick Rothfuss. — I’ve always had a penchant toward epic fantasy novels. The authors always seem to weave in subtle bits of profound wisdom amid their tales of dragons, elves, magic, and kingdoms. …