Data Science Week 0
Tags: beginners, datascience
Published: 2022-11-08 08:07:24

Hello and welcome to my blog, in this first post I'm going to be introducing myself, telling you about what started my interest in Data Science, and what I've learned in my first week in the Flatiron Bootcamp.

## A Little bit about me
Before we get into the start of my Data Science journey, I am going to tell you a little bit about myself. My Name is Leif and I am 23 years old. Like many others some of my favorite things to do include spending time with family, going to concerts, and playing sports to keep myself active. However, when I feel myself needing to decompress after a long day, I usually find myself reading a good book or, embarrassingly enough, watching some trashy reality tv. While that's all fun and entertaining, it is actually some of my more unique hobbies that started paving the way for my interest in data science.

## Magic
I bet you're wondering what card tricks and sleight of hand could possibly have in common with Data Science. Well to be honest not really anything, at least not to me, until about 3 years ago. At that time a magician friend of mine reached out to me asking if I wanted to help out on this project he was working on. The project was essentially going through different tricks, methods, sleight of hand techniques and then testing them in front of different focus groups. On this project, I learned a lot about collecting data on this project as we constantly had to change our testing parameters and polling methods. We were trying to reliably quantify many abstract variables like enjoyment, impossibility, and suspicion. At the end of the testing, after much trial and error, late night pizza brainstorms, and some luck, we had found ways to get relevant data for almost all our testing variables. We were able to collect the data on what audiences were thinking during a trick and their reactions afterwards. As well as finding many techniques that made tricks much more fooling. The findings from this project helped me become a much better magician, and for the first time I learned how useful data can be. Even in areas I had never thought to quantify.

## Fantasy Football
The other hobby of mine that brought me closer to the realm of Data Science was actually fantasy football. After playing in a season long family league for many years, I eventually decided to try out the Daily fantasy football betting on Draftkings. I quickly realized that my sports knowledge and my previous season long experience was not going to cut it here playing against sports gurus, professional poker players, and other experienced fantasy football players. If I wanted to stop losing money and start winning, then I needed to find an edge. After a lot of researching, I found the answer I needed. Math...yeah not exactly as glamorous as I'd hoped, but it could work. After brushing up on what I remembered from my stats class, I started looking at the projection models and optimizers many of the pros used. I reached out on twitter and discord to some of the pros in the industry and asked for their advice. Some friendly replies later, I had set up my players projections with an optimizer, created some rules based on ownership percentage and previous winning lineup construction. I kept building teams using the optimizer, while continually adjusting my rules and projections. Then 3 weeks later, I had my first big win where I turned $60 dollars into $7,500. My Experience with DraftKings taught me a lot about statistics. Especially using past stats to try and predict future outcomes as well as, learning when, where, and how heavily to let certain data impact my projections.

## Flatiron Bootcamp
While my hobbies had led me closer to the world of Data Science, I still didn't really know what data Science was or how to get into it. Until, in a random stroke of luck, I came across a Tik Tok video of someone talking about their experience in a Software Engineering bootcamp. As I was wrapping up my second year of community college and was not looking forward to 2 more years of school, the 3-month structure of the bootcamp sounded perfect to me. After doing some more research into the coding bootcamps, I found Flatiron   which was exactly what I was looking for. Then when I saw they had a Data science course as well, I knew data science would be a great fit with my skillset. 
Now one week into the bootcamp, I feel like I have already learned so many new things from using GitHub and GitBash, to accessing and manipulating data in python and pandas. Even though like I've learned so much, I know my journey is just getting started and I am excited for all the new things still to learn!