Discovering the data science community, becoming part of it, and expanding it

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

My path to becoming part of a data science community was happenstance. I started programming as a graduate student because I wanted to increase the spatial and temporal scales of my analyses. The scale increase was from one location for a few months to the entire coast of Western North America for many years. For larger scale analyses, I needed satellite data, which I downloaded from a data repository. I learned to use shell scripts to automatically download data because going through 5 to 10 internet links to manually download hundreds of files was tedious. The files with satellite data were large and in special file formats so I learned how to access and analyze them using R.

K.A.S. Mislan on The Carpentries

Discovering the data science community, becoming part of it, and expanding it