Hello everyone, this post is a bit special as I will try to recap whatever I read / saw or happened to me around data analysis during the past year.
I hope you’ll get a good read about this field and this will help you to find your way on your career.
I wanted to do several posts first, one about the best article, one about the best module for python, etc… Instead, I will condense everything into this post. It will be diverse and it may be long but you can switch to your preferred topic anytime
Best Blog and/or Article about Web Analytics 2018
One of the blog I discovered when I joined my new company is the blog from Pedro Monjo. A (very experienced) consultant that is really well explaining some hidden topics from the Adobe Marketing Cloud experience.
Blog from Pedro Monjo: https://www.pedromonjo.com/
On Adobe Analytics, my specialized tool, I found that the spark pages created by Jen Lasser are really helpful if you want to have a nice overview on how to get started or improve your Adobe Analytics skills.
Example of spark page for Workspace tips : https://spark.adobe.com/page/kNQvfsGL2LYYX/?red=a
Another example for 2018 releases for Adobe Analytics : https://spark.adobe.com/page/unXKTKpXrDalD/
A good thing working in a company with talented people is that it makes this section easier to fill. You just have to look to your inbox to receive cool contents.
I don’t have to present webanalyticsfordevelopers from Jan Exner, hard to pick a specific article from Jan but he created a really nice series of articles on “Creating a Launch Extension”. Anyone working with Launch should have a look on this in order to better gauge how (easy) it is to create a custom solution for your website using Launch.
Start of this series : https://webanalyticsfordevelopers.com/2018/11/20/launch-make-an-extension-reloaded/
I know this section was super oriented on Adobe Analytics but this is what I am interested the most at the moment and where you should be as well. Adobe Analytics is definitely not the perfect solution but it is one of the most advanced on web analytics. So you should find interesting things to read there.
Best Blog and/or Article about Python 2018
The website that I discovered this year and that I liked very much in order to improve my python skills was the one with Dan Bader. It is not for beginner I would say as there are lots of article for intermediate level but it really shows it in a fun way and make it easy to digest those new things.
Real Python website : https://realpython.com/
The other website I really read a lot is towardsdatascience, which is a subsection from the medium website. I think that I read a VERY good article about data analysis every week at least. The quality will probably decrease next year as I am now part of the author on this website. 😉
towards data science : https://towardsdatascience.com
When I was on my previous company, I started a python club in order democratize python for other users. I don’t think that you need to be a developer to understand the language and make use of it. During those sessions, I met a good friend of mine, as curious and even better with python skills. 2 articles I could recommend from his blog :
Scraping legality : https://www.ankuroh.com/programming/web-scraping-using-python-introduction/
Automate your excel reporting with python : https://www.ankuroh.com/programming/excel-report-automation-using-python/
The things that I learned this year
I used to be a Digital Analyst manager before I moved to my new Consultant role, and thanks to my change I could see better that the things I was doing on my own were actually helpful to a relative large number of people / companies. This was one of the reason I started this blog this year and it is hard to believe that I already realized around 30+ blog posts in 6 months. .
I am not sure if I can keep up with this space as I try to thrive on quality, writing the blog post with detail instruction and doing the research on the topic beforehand is taking quite a long time. As you have also noticed, I am creating different python module so you can re-use the code I have created.
Changing job was not an easy move as I was very comfortable on my Digital Analyst job, managing 30+ websites implementation and analysis… But one of the reason for my move is that it was getting too comfortable, or the company let me be too comfortable…(but that a different story 😉 ). Also I found very good people to replace me there and that should be the job of every manager, make sure that you develop someone to do your stuffs, then you can focus on growing on something else.
To go back on a very skill level thing, what I learned this year, I could mention :
- Git : BIG learning for me as I learned developing on my own and never really use this Version Control system. I love it and I try to use it as much as possible to keep this VERY useful skill up to date.
- Selenium : I used selenium a bit before but this year I really try to do some more advanced stuffs with it and it is a really useful module.
- Fluent Python : I don’t know if a better book exists about Python if you want to improve your game. This is book will improve your python skills by 10-15%, those 10-15% that turns you to good python developer. You will not code the same way after reading it.
My plan for 2019
This article wouldn’t be complete with my plan for 2019. The problem for me is that I am very curious about everything. There is this list of things I want to learn and I need to shrink it in order to have a realistic view on what is possible in 2019.
In 2019, I would really like to realize those things
- Improve my python knowledge on visualization (bokeh, altair, seaborn , chartify, matplotlib, ggplot,…)
- Start a new category on this blog which would focus on combining Data and Philosophy/Sociology (one of my other interest)
- Learn Nodejs (and write a useful extension for Launch)
- Others :
- Improve my DAX skills for Microsoft
- Learn how to use Heroku, AWS and Kubernets for Cloud Python Application
- Start on Machine Learning & Neuronal Network articles with python (tensorflow & scikit-learn)
I would need to see if this is manageable as that I also would like to keep time for myself in order to read and learn new things.
In any case, creating this blog was a blast and even if I struggle some times as I set some pressure on myself to do regular interesting themes. I hope this will go on for a while.
I may have guests / co-author coming to write regularly other articles so hopefully articles will get more diverse and increase quality.