I have not had a chance to write a post for Day 3, so I am going to combine Day 3 into the same post with Day 4.

Day 3 - Some Pandas Clarity, Finally!

I think the highlight of the day was going over solutions to Pandas challenges we’ve had so far. This allowed me to have a really nice resource on this package. Since the solutions were in a IPython Notebook, it was nice to see how they work out right away.

We have also learned how to start our blog on GitHub Pages, so this entry is going to actually be in sync the most between time of posting and time of happenings in the description.

Day 4 - The Final Stretch (for the First Project)!

Still not feeling totally at home with Python Pandas data analysis toolkit, I started my day with reviewing the Pandas solutions that I talked about in Day 3. I am starting to feel more and more at home with the tool. It is actually pretty amazing what I can do with a Gigabyte of data without breaking my computer. :smirk:

The pair programming problem was actually pretty challenging, not because I couldn’t easily find a solution, but because it was hard to optimize the code to make it work faster. Since data sets tend to be humongous, it is paramount to be able to come up with efficient algorithms that are able to process it in a timely manner. There is definitely a room for improvement of my algorithms. It was nice to see some pretty innovative solutions from classmates.

The most important part of the day, in my opinion, revolved around finishing up our first data science project with my team. Right after lunch, each of us continued working on our respective parts of the project. As time grew closer to the official end of the Metis workday (6 PM), we decided to leave the classroom and settle in a private conference room for better collaboration. Two hours later we had our solution, our presentation, and our talking points. It was pretty exciting to see how our work comes to fruition with every executed in a IPython Notebook line of code. The advice I can give you on your projects at a bootcamp like Metis is to stick with your team till the end, even when the day approaches its end (especially when it is OK to stay inside for the night, I think, although that was not needed this time).