Thanks Jose

Pierian Data logo and name are property of Jose M Portilla and Pierian Data.

I wanted to take a quick minute to write up a shout-out to Jose M Portilla, the teacher on Udemy.com whose classes got me interested in the nuts and bolts of data science. I've actually gone along taking many of his courses over the course of a year as their subject matter fit what was needed in terms of computer skills for my work at Translational. From python basics and algorithms, to data science processing and data wrangling, to SQL syntax and use, and further into distributed computing and machine learning models. The first time I successfully used Pandas on a small data subset of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to handle missing values was pretty cool, and my understanding of machine learning from his courses guided the way for me to use support vector machines for recursive feature elimination on high-feature-dimensionality SNP datasets.

Moving from being a project domain specialist helping programmers to a programmer working as a project domain specialist has been great for my career and is one of the deciding factors for me deciding to pursue further formal education in Computer Science. I often revisit his courses for reference and continue to sign up for and take new courses as he makes them available. As of this post I am taking his course on Scala and Spark for Big Data and Machine Learning even as I prepare to take my first semester of CS classes at CU Boulder, and I'm eye balling his new Flask class next.

I can't wait to see what he comes out with in future.

Thanks, Jose!