DEV Community: abubakar

Explore Data Science Academy Experience (EDSA)

abubakar — Sat, 13 Aug 2022 18:27:38 +0000

Hello👋 Aspiring Data Scientist

This blog post will take you through my journey with Explore Data science academy(EDSA).

Let’s start with the question of what Explore Data Science Academy is all about.

Explore Data Science Academy is a global cutting-edge Data Science Academy that was launched in response to the growing digital skills gap in Africa, The Academy was found In 2017 by the CEO and Co-founder Shaun Dippnall, The program just started with an in-person 100 students in South Africa. Moving forward to today Explore Data Science Academy has grown out of South Africa and now Explore has students across Nigeria and Kenya to unlock Africans talent at scale and solve important problems that will make a positive impact on the world.

Let’s now move on to how I found Explore Data Science Academy or how Explore found me I should say.

Coming from a computer science background I am someone who really loves problem-solving and Exploring new things, well data science is about exploring data, finding insights, and asking the right questions to solve business problem, to me that was the right path to take moving on with my career, But the problem was I couldn’t find the right materials and mentorship to guide me through, yes there are lots of materials on the internet but knowing which one to pick in terms of affordability and high-quality resource was not easy, It was one of these nights after a long day of work when I finally take my phone sit back and go through social media I was scrolling through Instagram when came across the advertisement for the Explore Accelerator Data Science program, let’s start with the good news you don’t have pay anything to get started, Yes it’s right Pay nothing.

Seeing this I was really amazed I remember asking the question is that even real, well I made my research to learn more about the academy and what it has to offer, The program offers a full-time Data science course for 6 months and additional 3 months of internship and you only pay back when you get a job, it’s call income share agreement and at the same time Explore will help you with job search, after knowing all that and seeing the success stories from other Explorers, I was looking forward to getting into the program.

Let’s talk about the admission processes of Explore.

Here are the steps you have to go through to get into the program,

Step One: Register and apply, you register to open explore account and apply to the accelerator program.

Step two: Verbal and numerical Assessments

Step three: Logical reasoning Case Study

Step four: Video Interview submission.

That’s just a brief list of the steps to learn more about the program check the link at the end of this post.

Well, I went through all the steps, and guess what! I was lucky I got accepted into the program, I have to say it felt amazing. Moving forward the program started with a general call with almost every student and Explore staffs at Explore, A brief intro to the course, the program mentors and the goal of the program was given.

The Road map of the Explore Accelerator Journey

The program is structured In a way you start with the basics and gradually move to more advanced concepts and that’s not only it, but it’s also about the community, being around amazing people from around Africa all with the same goal to learn and help each other grow and the support provided by the mentors. We were organized into smaller groups called (pods) to engage and interact with fellow students and the mentor, I have to say the mentor’s in Explore are one of the amazing people to work with, always willing to help and guide you through the process.

Let’s talk about the skill I developed during and time at Explore.

To start with Explore is not just about the technical skills but also the soft skills are taken into great consideration, the technical skills includes Data visualization with Power Bi, python, SQL, advanced ML, deep learning, and AWS cloud computing among others, and for the soft skills we have the thrive seasons where we get develop our interpersonal skills such as communication skills, presentation skill, problem-solving ability, team management, project management and much more.

The best thing about Explore is not that you learn the skills but you have to put them into practice, after the first 3 months of learning we moved into to project phase where we were organized into groups of 4 to 5 people with a supervisor to work on a data science project from start to finish, it’s really amazing putting all we’ve learned into practices and we had the opportunity to the deploy our solutions on AWS cloud.

I really enjoyed the experience, especially working on model building and model deployment with AWS it gave me the boost to now pursue cloud computing and MLOps moving forward, Explore also give’s us the opportunity to take the AWS cloud practitioner certification exams for free after fulfilling the course requirements, it’s been a great journey.

There is a lot to say about Explore but let’s keep things brief for now.

I hope this blog post was helpful, If you enjoy reading it share and comment below, and if you are curious to learn more about the projects we’ve worked on at Explore let me know in the comments section.

For more information about Explore visit: Explore Data Science Academy
Explore Accelerator program

Database Normalization with SQL

abubakar — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 11:43:50 +0000

Hey👋 SQL enthusiast

This is a guide on Database Normalization and how to implement normalization using SQL, let's get started.

What is Database Normalization
Normalization is a technique used for evaluating and reorganizing table structures to minimize redundancies, improve data integrity, improve storage efficiency, and reduce the need to re-design the database if new data is introduced. Database normalization removes data inconsistencies which may cause the analysis of our data to be more complicated. These inconsistencies could come from updating records, inserting, or deleting records, which is known as update anomaly, insertion, and deletion anomaly, normalization also includes the removal of duplicate records which in turn saves storage.
The figure below shows the stages of Database normalization.

Let's take a look at the first normal form, what does it take for a database table to be in the first normal form. Here are the rules for a table to be in first normal form (1NF)

Each column should contain an atomic value
A column should contain data of the same data type eg (if a column contains an integer all the other elements in the column should be an integer)
Each column should have a unique column name
The order in which data are stored in the columns does not matter.

let's take a look at a table to better understand the concept of 1NF

Records Table Not Normalize

As you can see from the above table there are columns with duplicate elements in the database table, from the last row, the columns are (student major Std_major, courses title CTitle, and Instructor location Ilocation).
to solve this problem we are going to create a new table and insert only one atomic value into every column in the table.

Here is the code used to create the table and insert the element into the table from the original table.

--creating a new table for the schools Record 1NF
CREATE TABLE Schools_Record_1NF (Std_ID VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL, 
                                 Std_Name VARCHAR(50), 
                                 Std_address VARCHAR(50), 
                                 Std_Major VARCHAR(50), 
                                 CID VARCHAR NOT NULL, 
                                 CTitle VARCHAR(50), 
                                 Iname VARCHAR(50), 
                                 Ilocation VARCHAR(100), 
                                 Grade CHAR(5))

--Inserting into the Schools Record 1NF table
INSERT INTO Schools_Record_1NF(Std_ID, Std_Name, 
                               Std_address, Std_Major, 
                               CID, CTitle, Iname, 
                               Ilocation, Grade)

--Using Case statement to deal with columns with duplicate entries
SELECT Std_ID, Std_Name, Std_address,
-- The CASE Statement here checks the first entry in the column Using (SUBSTR AND INSTR)
    CASE WHEN
        SUBSTR(Std_Major, 1, INSTR(Std_Major, ',')-1)='' THEN Std_Major
        ELSE SUBSTR(Std_Major,1,INSTR(Std_Major, ',')-1)
    END AS Std_Major,
    CASE WHEN
        SUBSTR(CID,1,INSTR(CID, ' ')-1)='' THEN CID
        ELSE SUBSTR(CID,1,INSTR(CID, ' ')-1)
    END AS CID,
    CASE WHEN
        SUBSTR(CTitle,1,INSTR(CTitle,',')-1)='' THEN CTitle
        ELSE SUBSTR(CTitle,1,INSTR(CTitle,',')-1)
    END AS CTitle,
    CASE WHEN
        SUBSTR(Iname,1,INSTR(Iname,',')-1)='' THEN Iname
        ELSE SUBSTR(Iname,1,INSTR(Iname,',')-1)
    END AS Iname, 
    CASE WHEN
        SUBSTR(Ilocation,1,INSTR(Ilocation, ',')-1)='' THEN Ilocation
        ELSE SUBSTR(Ilocation,1,INSTR(Ilocation, ',')-1)
    END AS Ilocation,
    CASE WHEN
        SUBSTR(Grade,1,INSTR(Grade, ',')-1)='' THEN Grade
        ELSE SUBSTR(Grade,1,INSTR(Grade, ',')-1)
    END AS Grade
FROM School_Record

-- Using the union operator to join the first and the second entry of the table
UNION

SELECT Std_ID, Std_Name, Std_address, 
-- Using SUBSTR and INSTR to access the second entry inside the columns
    SUBSTR(Std_Major,INSTR(Std_Major,',')+1) As Std_Major,
    SUBSTR(CID, INSTR(CID,' ')+1) AS CID,
    SUBSTR(CTitle, INSTR(CTitle, ',')+1) AS CTitle,
    SUBSTR(Iname, INSTR(Iname, ',')+1) AS Iname, 
    SUBSTR(Ilocation, INSTR(Ilocation, ',')+1) AS Ilocation, 
    SUBSTR(Grade, INSTR(Grade, ',')+1) AS Grade
FROM School_Record
-- Checking the columns with multiple entries
WHERE Std_Major LIKE "%,%" or CID LIKE "% %"

Here is the new table after applying the above code

Records Table in 1NF

one new row is added to the table rather than having columns with non atomic values.

Next up let's move into the second normal form (2NF)

The Second Normal Form (2NF)

Table not in 2NF

The above table is not in 2NF because not all the columns in the table are depending on the primary keys of the table. e.g. columns like the student name Std_name only depends on the student Id Std_ID column which is one part of the primary key since both Std_ID and CID are the primary keys in this case and also courses title only depends on courses Id CID without depending on student Id Std_ID which means we are having a partial functional dependency.

To Convert a table to Second Normal Form
The table must be in 1NF.

A table in 2NF should not have a partial functional dependency.

What is a partial functional dependency?
let's understand Functional dependency first
Dependency in a table is when the columns in the table are depending on a particular column like the primary key of a table.
Partial functional dependency is when a particular column is not full depending on all the primary key columns of the table (in this case our primary key is more than one column).
To implement the second normal form 2NF we will start by creating new tables one for the student information, instructor information, and another table for the student grade information.


--Creating the Tables for the Second Normal Form 2NF
CREATE TABLE Student_Info_2NF (
                               Std_ID VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL, 
                               Std_Name VARCHAR(50), 
                               Std_address VARCHAR(50),
                               Std_Major VARCHAR(50),
                               PRIMARY KEY(Std_ID));

CREATE TABLE Instructor_Info_2NF(
                                 CID VARCHAR NOT NULL, 
                                 CTitle VARCHAR(50), 
                                 Iname VARCHAR(50), 
                                 Ilocation VARCHAR(100),
                                 PRIMARY KEY(CID));

CREATE TABLE Grade_Info_2NF(
                            Std_ID VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
                            CID VARCHAR NOT NULL,
                            Grade CHAR(5),
                            PRIMARY KEY(Std_ID, CID),
                            FOREIGN KEY(Std_ID) REFERENCES Student_Info_2NF(Std_ID) ,
                            FOREIGN KEY(CID) REFERENCES Instructor_Info_2NF(CID));

students Information table

Instructor information table

students grade information table

Next we will be moving on to the 3NF

Third Normal Form 3NF

For Relation to be in 3NF the Relation First must be in 1NF and 2NF

They should be no transitive dependencies

Well, transitive dependency simply means that all other columns in the table should only depend on the PRIMARY KEY Column only and primary key alone.

Based on the tables we currently have,
there is only one table that is showing an issue which is the instructor information table because the Primary key here is the course id (CID) and the instructor location can be determined by the CID and it can also be determined by the instructor name Iname column, so to solve this problem we are going to create a new table for the Instructor information and another table with the courses information.

here is the code to create the table and insert the data into the table from the Instructor information table above.

CREATE TABLE Instructor_Info_3NF (
                                 Iname VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
                                 Ilocation VARCHAR(100),
                                 PRIMARY KEY (Iname));

CREATE TABLE Courses_Info_3NF(
                             CID VARCHAR NOT NULL, 
                             CTitle VARCHAR(50), 
                             Iname VARCHAR(50), 
                             PRIMARY KEY(CID)
                             FOREIGN KEY(Iname) REFERENCES Instructor_Info_3NF(Iname));

--Inserting into the Instructor_Info_3NF
INSERT INTO Instructor_Info_3NF(Iname, Ilocation)
SELECT Iname, Ilocation 
FROM Instructor_Info_2NF;

--Inserting into the Courses_Info_3NF
INSERT INTO Courses_Info_3NF(CID, CTitle, Iname )
SELECT CID, CTitle, Iname 
FROM Instructor_Info_2NF;

Here are the new tables

Instructor information table 3NF

Courses information table 3NF

We are going to stop on the 3NF

Conclusion
We have now completed the normalization process, In general most Databases are in 3NF, in this post you've understood what normalization is and also learned how to implement normalization using SQL.

Hope this blog helps you understand Database normalization. If you enjoy my blog please don't forget to like or comment on the article. It will encourage me to write more articles.

INRODUCTION TO AWS CLOUDFRONT (CDN)

abubakar — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 21:33:17 +0000

Hello, 👋 cloud enthusiast

Let’s talk about content delivery network (CDN) on AWS.

What is CDN? A content delivery network, Is a distributed network of proxies and data centers that provides High availability by speeding up the delivery of web content.

How does CDN work?
The content delivery network speeds the delivery of web content by bringing the content closer to the location of its users.
This is done through caching, a process that temporarily holds copies of data. This makes it easier and faster for users to load content from the internet because contents are cached on a physical server near the user.

Okay, now let’s talk about AWS CloudFront.

AWS CloudFront is a content delivery network with high performance, security, high availability (high transfer speed), and low latency network, Amazon CloudFront uses what is known as Edge location.

An edge location is a site that Amazon CloudFront uses to store cached copies of content closer to users for faster delivery.
AWS edge locations run more just CloudFront they also run a Domain Name Services (DNS) also known as the Amazon Route 53 it helps to direct users to the correct web location with reliably low latency.

How to get started with CloudFront

To get started with CloudFront here are the steps you have to take.

If you don’t have an amazon account start from Step 1 else move to the next step.

Step 1

Sign up to create an amazon account
After signing up for an account your account will automatically be signed up for AWS services including CloudFront and you only pay for what you use, you don’t need any extra steps.
Access your account to create an IMA user

You can access your account through the Amazon command-line Interface (CLI), the management console, AWS SDK, or API for each service, each service in AWS is an API call.

Step 2.

This is just a biref overview of CloudFront check out the links for more detail explanation.

REFERENCES

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront documentation

Hope this blog helps you on how to get started with AWS CloudFront. If you enjoy this blog please don't forget to like or comment on the article. It will encourage me to write more. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn

How to get Started with Cloud Computing | AWS Cloud

abubakar — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 12:56:53 +0000

A short blog post on how to get started with AWS Cloud

A Brief Introduction to AWS Cloud.

Hello,👋 cloud enthusiast
let's talk about cloud computing and AWS cloud

What is AWS? AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon, it stands for Amazon Web Service, it is a cloud Service provider, It provides cloud computing Platform on demand to individuals and organizations etc.

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources through the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Which simply means is the delivery of computing resources such as compute power, storage, Databases and more. you only pay for what you use and only when you use the resources.

With AWS cloud it is easy to scale up or down with just few clicks you can scale your infrastructure requirement when you need and only pay for what you use.

While benefiting from does services that are made available by AWS, Services such as the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing.

Amazon EC2 Is a virtual computing environment that provides scalable computing capacity on AWS cloud.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps you maintain availability and dynamically scale your infrastructure by adding and removing EC2 instances.

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (EBL) helps in automatically distributing the load from incoming traffics to multiple EC2 instances, not allowing one EC2 instance to do the job, EBL works both at the frontend and the backend, EBL runs on the regional level.

How to get started learning with AWS cloud

The best and must effective way to start learning about AWS cloud, is by using the materials made available by AWS, There are turns of learning materials made available by AWS, and are completely free, AWS has also set a goal to bring the cloud knowledge to 25 million people in more than 200 countries, The mission of AWS is to expand Access to Free Cloud Skills Training, the best way to help people around the the world from different backgrounds of knowledge is by making the learning resources available and accessible to learners of all level.

An AWS study finds that the need for digital training is greater than ever before, 85% of workers feeling they are in need of more technical skills now more than ever.

list of learning Resources and how to get started.

AWS Digital Training
AWS Skills Builder is a self paced digital training, with more than 500 digital courses developed by AWS experts to help you improve on your career and achieve your goals and is available any time.
To get started with skill builder digital training all you need to do is sign-up to create an account and get started right away.

AWS re/start
re/start
A full time class-room based training program that prepares individuals with career in the cloud and connection to a potential employer.
The program trains individuals with AWS cloud fundamentals, networking, python and more through hands-on-labs and course-work.

The re/start program is available in multiple countries, to get started go to the website and check first if your country is in the list of available locations and if your country is not available you should check back after some time as new countries are added continuously.

AI and ML scholarship program
AI and ML Scholarship
This program is in collaboration with Intel and Udacity, The program aims to help underrepresented and underserve high school and collage students to learn the foundational ML concepts and prepare for career in AI and ML.

AWS Educate
The AWS educate is a global program that provides students with resources for building their skills in the cloud, the program is completely free with access to content, training path and a job board with employment opportunities.
To get started with the Educate program all you need to do is register for an account and get approved by AWS.

Best Tips.

The best way to solidify the things you are learning from the above resources is by practicing hands-on labs, This way you will be putting your knowledge in good practice.

To practice the hands-on labs you will need to create an amazon free tier account which will give you access to AWS services for twelve months for free.
note Not all services are available with the free tier account.

Hope this blog helps you on your cloud journey. If you enjoy my blog please don't forget to like or comment on the article. It will encourage me to write more articles. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn