While I couldn’t have been more excited to start the MIDS program (Master of Information and Data Science) at UC Berkeley, the very first class just happened to conflict with the opportunity to meet this Guy…
I guess that proves that even more than a “data wonk,” I am at heart a “science freak.” We ended up even getting to walk with Mr. Guy on the way to go see his buddy Neil deGrasse Tyson give an entertaining lecture about Sci-Fi movies and their scientific accuracy and/or lack of it, so it was a full-on geek-out that night. But I digress!
Prior to the first live classes, we had access to a killer application that provided access to tons of pre-recorded lectures. I have it on my desktop, my iPhone, and my iPad…
You can stream the lectures or download them for offline viewing later and can adjust the speed of the video to really plow through them in record time. If you go fast enough, you feel like you’re Neo downloading knowledge directly into your brain. Before long, your screen has check marks by everything and then you look up and say to yourself “I know Python.” You know you’re addicted to the app when you grab your iPad and are actually not sure whether you’d rather check to see what your classmates and professor are posting on the wall or play Plants vs. Zombies. Admit it, just by reading this and you’re already starting thinking about studying for those GREs and going back to school!
Finally, it was time for live classes to begin…
Not your gramma’s graduate school! It was a lively and interesting discussion and nobody sang the Brady Bunch theme song. There also wasn’t any singing when the 2nd homework assignment was handed out and was surprisingly challenging: writing python files from within a bash script and getting up to speed on a code versioning app called git. Being pretty new to git, I forgot to add a comment once at the end of a “git commit” command and was thrown into a nightmare of a text editor called vim that I COULD NOT ESCAPE FROM without doing web research. Turns out that the command I was looking for was “:wq” to close the window. As a former software developer, stuff like that drives me crazy. Even if a programmer was sick enough to think that that was a good command for something as common as closing a window, did he/she not have a manager to say “Okay, you know that someone other than you might end up using this program, right?”
A friend of mine backed up my initial impressions of git’s user-friendliness: “Yes, git is overwhelmingly cryptic. A basic workflow can be described in a more straightforward way, but God forbid anything go wrong. I’ve spent many half-days trying to fix a mistake in git. It’s kind of amazing to me that it has caught on as much as it has.” He also supplied me with this helpful advice…
I ended up getting through the assignment without too much trouble, but evidently others went a bit astray, because the following day, the professor posted a message on the wall: “…Please don’t force push to the github playground … if you do that, that means you’re going to overwrite someone else’s changes. If you do that, we can’t keep track of who all made changes. That means we’ll also be modifying the assignment – we just want you to have one change in the github playground.”
After reading that, I naturally had to post the following to the wall…
Good times!
