The Data Science Saga - Intro
Published: 2021-01-24 21:01:01


	Today I'm going to talk about a little bit of my journey, how I decided to learn how to code and become a Data Scientist, and what I think awaits me in the future.

	First I think I need to talk about my background. I always loved math, to me it is super cool, effective and straightforward with no bad sides to it. It has always been my favorite subject in school and I never had trouble with it, so I knew that I had to do something involving it. When I was about to finish high school, I heard about a military school from the air force that you graduate in 4 years as a pilot and with some minors in engineering and business administration. However, I didn't do well enough in other areas, like Portuguese language, which made me believe even more  that I should do something with math, and I laid my eyes on Civil Engineering for the first time. It was pretty cool, involved math, and it had several social programs to make homes for those in need.
	At my second year in university I had the chance to start an internship, so I did. The project was to offer a home to over 3300 families that had never had one. With the help of the government (which paid almost half of the costs), each family paid a little amount of money over 35 years. This is one of the main things that made me follow that career for a while. Back in these days I had to go daily to the internship, to my university and to another university where I was also studying Meteorology, that eventually I dropped out because it was too much to handle. In the Meteorology school for the first time I saw modeling.  Using a radar and previous data you could precisely say when it would rain, which is different from satellite that is less precise but helpful to get a larger, bird's eye view. I didn't know back then, but that modelling showed me the importance of capturing data. 
	About the coding and tech part of it, it started when I went to Argentina to get a master degree in Sustainability.  With my Civil Engineer background I thought would be a good idea, since I always liked the community aspect of civil engineering and how we can make the world a little better to the future. There I had to work, and with Latin America struggling economically these last couple of decades, it was pretty hard to find work, and Argentina is no different. When you did find a job, it wasn't the greatest either. The third one that I got was in an awesome place, at Accenture, as a Systems Operations Analyst, doing a lot of different stuff. It was good to understand how the engine behind these big companies work, and how much of that could be applied in great scale to help people. In a nutshell, I saw that using coding skills would be not only a "more me" thing but also more effective than pursuing more things in my previous area.
	We go into the future a little bit, something like 2 years ago from the time of writing this. My wife gets an offer to be a Data Scientist in the company she works in, so it would be a change of careers for her and a change of country for both of us. Back then, we were living in Sao Paulo, Brazil, but we hadn't considered going back to the U.S. anytime soon. However, it seemed like the best option, even more because this way she could try this new area that was super excited about. It didn't click with me right away, I thought it was something more applied to actuarial science, and that it wouldn't be anything close to a career change for me too.
	When we got here I was still kind of lost in the professional area. I could go with the safe option and stay in my field, but I finally took the leap of faith to do something different and risk a little bit. My super supportive wife told me that I should consider Data Science, and that with my background and analytical skills it would be a good fit, and that's when I think I finally figured out that is what I wanted to do.
	But why Data Science? Well, for starters, it's a cool profession, cool not in the meaning of looking flashy, but cool in the meaning of what you can do with the "power" you have.
	Considering Moore's Law ("number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years"), you can expect that at a barbecue on the weekend in 5 years or so to be approached by your friend, you guys are going to talk for a few minutes, until you ask him about his data science skills, or what does he do with that- this will lead to him getting your phone, touching his phone and with NFC, he is going to transfer all of your data (or the useful part of it). With his algorithm he is going to touch back again on yours and transmit all the things you should be doing, instead of the things you do, you know, like a judgmental aunt. All that going to be evaluated by n numbers of variables that he knows because 1) he is close to you and 2) he is even closer now, because he has all the info he gathered from your phone, that is linked to your smartwatch, maskbook, splitgram, toktok, tictactoe, chess, and whatever you have. Once again, scary, huh? 
	Well, 5 years is a long ways away from today. Maybe we are finally going to have our flying car, our bionics updated, our house with two extra bedrooms; one for the 3D printer (that might print everything else in this list) and one for the Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality and of course a pair of self-lacing Nike Air Mags like Marty McFly. By then, we also could realize that we are actually in the Matrix, but more likely in five beautiful and long years we could see, or even, participate is a civil war. Why am I bringing this up, you ask? Well, because we are living a crazy era, where information is rapidly becoming disinformation, and we are losing our skills to discuss and listen to people that think differently from us. You know what I'm going to blame next. 3, 2, 1? Social media.
	Through that same social media that the guy-who-is-married-to-my-sister got his info from, what you like, who you like, who are you checking the most, who you are more likely to vote... He also gathered the comments you made in a certain political group, talking about what happened last week about that thing, everyone being super polite, supportive and respecting others - after all, you all agree on all the subjects. He didn't find anything that raised red flags about you, 
but two of the people that are in the same group (let's call them B1 and B2), are in local public groups being super rude, aggressive and even physically threatening a guy, just because they discussed in the comments of a post that B1 made. So now, GWIMTMS(Guy-who-is-... you get it), is going to call the popo, tell them exactly what happened, where B1 and B2 live, their numbers, and where the other guy that was being threated lives. All of that there, on the social media, not even a single line he had to get from a forbidden place, hack his way through or force it, he only got some of this access through your maskbook profile together with his algorithm.
	So in the near future, I hope that I can help more and more people with something that I created "quickly" compared to the years I hope it lasts. Maybe something to help with mental health, maybe something related to adoption of dogs, or some machine learning to that make people see all their choices more clearly. I just hope to help someone else 1%, that would be awesome already.