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Discussion on: From dev to data scientist - A first post about data science

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leob profile image
leob

Pivoting from Web Dev to Data Science - do you think it make sense in general? Both web dev and data science are hot markets with plenty of job and good salaries, so in that regard it's a toss-up ...

I guess then that a decision to 'pivot' from one to the other should primarily be based on motivation/interest and not on pursuing a pot of gold.

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jhwinter profile image
Jonathan Winter

I'm hoping to do the same! I'm currently a Software Engineer, but most of my two years of experience has only been with web development. Do you have any resources that you can recommend for how to learn the necessary skills/tools for Data Science?

Personally, my motivation is just that I love mathematics/statistics and they have always come fairly easy to me. I haven't been in the tech industry for very long, but I have gotten very bored with web development. Personally, I'd much rather spend four hours analysing algorithms or finding patterns in data than trying to center a button on a web page.

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leob profile image
leob

Hi, well the good thing is there are many, as in MANY, resources to be found online. You can really learn everything about "data science" on the interwebs.

Over the years I've collected a boatload of links and bookmarks, and I could share some of those if you want.

BUT (here's the disclaimer) I'm not doing anything with it :-) for the time being, and maybe indefinitely, I'm staying in web development, I don't seriously consider 'pivoting' ... my question was more on a hypothetical level ... :-)

Web development doesn't bore me yet and even though I'm also fond of math and all that I'm not prepared and willing to put in a ton of effort to get any good in this (very different) subject area.

I'm still interested but more as a glorified hobby, dabbling with graphs and data on the sidelines. I'm a remote freelancer and my hunch is that it is simply A LOT easier to get "remote" gigs as a web developer than as a 'data scientist', that's one of the reasons why I'm not seriously pursuing it (lol I don't even know Python).

Anyway, maybe going through some "awesome lists" would be a good start? links to lists of links ... ;-)

Just a completely random selection:

github.com/academic/awesome-datasc...
github.com/krzjoa/awesome-python-d...
github.com/siboehm/awesome-learn-d...
dev.to/r0f1/awesome-data-science-w...

Data science is of course an extremely broad subject: visualization, BI (business intelligence), data engineering (ETL and so on), ML/AI ....... I'd argue that saying you're a "data scientist" doesn't even mean that much, you need to figure out what you want to specialize in.

Good luck on your journey!