Day 20: Fall is Around the Corner

        This is almost the end of week 5 of the Summer Institute, and it feels like the semester is just around the corner. We have about 3 weeks left, and we are already working on Chapters 6 and 8. We ended the day yesterday with a conceptual discussion on the way the book reads for students who have never had coding experience. It became clear that we need to introduce Python and layer Markdown and Jupyter Notebooks on top of it. So, I spent this morning writing a short introduction to Markdown, assuming that the students already know how to code. Dr. Jan and I later discussed my work, and in the conversation, we both realized that Markdown and Jupyter Notebook introduction needs to come before Python for students to have an environment for testing and learning their code. So, I re-wrote the section to make it more general and broad. I enjoyed working this way, because I got to capitalize on my talents as a self-starter, creating the section on the Notebook environment from scratch, and also as a team-player, requesting, receiving, and taking into consideration the feedback from Dr. Jan. I do not think I fully understand why I enjoyed the experience of writing the section as much as I did, however, I will definitely reflect on this later.

        I spent the rest of the day working with the pair-programmers on their chapters. Sandesh and Imma successfully finished making changes to Chapter 8. I am very glad about this as I knew how they struggled with editing Chapter 2, which focused on Google Sheets rather than code. I then visited Sama and Roberto who are currently working on Chapter 6. They were in the middle of a discussion on scraping data, transforming it into a dictionary, and then turning that dictionary into a dataframe. They were confused because the book was missing multiple commands. We discussed the problem, and came to the conclusion that it would be best to reach out to Brad Miller, the author of the book, to ask him about his original ideas. Meanwhile, we all spent some time reading more about web scraping in order to be more prepared for the conversation with Brad.

        While I was working on the Summer Institute work, a student of mine from last semester, Kumbula, asked a few questions about reading a text file to a variable. At first, I could not think of a solution, however, after about 5 minutes I realized that he was not in the proper directory. That was an easy fix. Later, it turned out that some of the characters did not read because of unicode errors. I knew exactly what was going on because I spent some time yesterday resolving Unicode errors in the How to Think Like a Data Scientist book. I am not a superstitious person, however, that felt like a sign from above.