How learning is helping me 📖

How learning is helping me 📖

A few years back, one of the former directors where I work made kind of an off handed comment about how valuable Python programming is to have as a skill set in our increasingly technology driven jobs of today and tomorrow.

While I wasn’t a newbie at Python, I was no means an expert. Most of my Python experience was with writing short little QGIS plugins, to help automate topographic map making for the blog. I actually taught myself a seven or eight years ago Python for specifically that purpose. That said, I’m far more familiar with Perl and PHP so they were much more my go to then Python.

But I was ready to learn more Python as I wanted a fast and reliable way to processing geospatial data for map making. Geopandas offered a way I could create such scripts and with Jupyter Notebook’s interpretive boxes, gave me a lot of freedom to experiment and develop code. Learning Geopandas turned me on to Pandas, which is an amazing tool for manipulating large datasets, in a reliable and reproducible fashion.

As time went on I became more interested in Python, reading several books over the summer. It became a big portion of my summer reading program in 2021 — many a day in the hammock reading about Python. Then I got interested in R with its great graphics and mapping capabilities along with excellent access to Census data and I was hooked, trying to learn whatever I can about the language. This summer I’ve moved on to reading up on statistical analysis so I can get more out of data.

While maybe the short term benefits are obvious – being able to make graphs and maps for the blog and social media – the long term benefits are even greater. Being able to understand statistics can lead me to make better decisions independently of commentators and others who may have a bias or not fully understand my unique situation. It makes it possible to do my job better, and makes me more marketable in the future.

Computers are only getting more powerful, data more accessible with the internet. It would be a mistake not to continously learning and expanding one’s knowledge to better prepare oneself for tomorrow. Learning need not be dry, especially when you can already envision many uses for the data.