Doesn't this make you miss dplyr tho?
— Ashir Aseesh Borah (@AshirBorah) May 2, 2020 Listen I’m as surprised as you. I’m on record in multiple places talking about how much I love dplyr. I’ve referred to it as “my favorite package” more than once, and have definitely said that you could pry it “from my cold, dead hands.” dplyr is a fantastic package for data manipulation, and has been the primary workhorse in my analytics workflow for the past few years.
What is it like learning Python if you know R? It’s like being every single character in this scene all at once, all the time:
Which is to say that the last two months have been some of the most frustrating months of my learning life - and I’m including 3.5 years in an Immunology & Infectious Disease PhD program in that calculation.
Sure I’m a little frustrated with Python, and I’m kind of frustrated with the fields of machine learning (and deep learning and data science and AI), but nothing compares with how frustrated I am with how slowly I’m learning.
Reach for “Good Enough” Looking at my plans for this past week, I was pretty ambitious in what I thought I’d accomplish. And while I technically started what I said I would, we’ll have to use a very generous definition of the word start to make it work. Sometimes learning machine learning feels overwhelming to me - there’s so much involved! From matrix math and linear algebra and calculus to programming in python to applying everything to machine and deep learning projects.
A note on COVID-19 We are currently in the midst of a global pandemic, and it feels disingenuous for me not to acknowledge the context in which this learning series is being created. When faced with overwhelming circumstances, one of my go-to coping mechanisms is to spend as much time as possible learning. Burying oneself in learning doesn’t have to be your coping mechanism, and for many people I suspect that it is not.
Have you ever played Civ? You start the game by choosing your historical figure, set up your gameplay, and are suddenly dropped in the middle of nowhere. Well, you’re somewhere - but everything on the map is obscured, completely shrouded in an impenetrable fog. Which in a lot of ways is what it feels like when you decide that this is it. This time you’re going to learn Data Science//Machine Learning//AI//Deep Learning//the “it” thing of the moment.