Confort Code: phase 2 of a coding bootcamp

– Linear progression

Yes the subtitle should make you angry. You’re reading this, which means, if I were a statistician, (which this past week I basically was) I’d put the odds of you being a science nerd at greater than that of a coin toss. The correct term is linear regression, which is really misleading. Things go down when they regress. In this field if you’re doing things right, they’re going up at a forty-five degree angle or so.

I feel it should be said that Pandas is just amazing. More specifically, the people who paved the way in computer science, punching holes in cards and walking across campus to run their program, only to find out hours later that there was an error. They lead to amazing things like Pandas.

I used to type on my macintosh and pretend I was writing out complex commands to the computer. It would yell at me in its foreign language that I was not saying the right thing in the right way and I would yell back in little boy midwest plain-english. I didn’t dare to dream that one day I could understand how to talk to a computer. It just wasn’t in the cards.

But now I find myself approaching my 7th week of Data Science bootcamp. And you know, I think I’m liking this computer science thing more and more. It makes me a better thinker, which in turn, makes me a better person. But about Pandas.

I cant’t believe you can copy a link from certain websites with tables of information on them, go into Pandas and paste it in the right format and boom! Now you have data that you can explore, analyze and manipulate. You have to have certain Pandas packages. Now packages, that’s something I bet those students with the cards, running across quads to get to another building, never thought could happen.

Some pretty brilliant and caring people created these packages which can read a string of letters and numbers and symbols and allow one to print out a map of King County, Washington with a heat map of home prices on it. I can’t even imagine the work that went into something like that. Thankless work too, for the most part, I’m sure. But if by some chance you’re reading this and you had a hand in making Pandas a reality. Thank you so very much from the bottom of my heart.

I am journeying into the world of Machine Learning next week. That little boy typing away at the old Macintosh would be proud I hope. I know I am of him.