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Data Science while Working from Home

From the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, organisations quickly made paradigm shifts which were considered fundamental in slowing down the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Telecommuting became a recurring uptake among companies; it was no longer reserved to the top decision makers and CEOs.

It quickly turned from being a luxury to a viable necessity that allowed companies to remain at home – attract clients and still reap profits while at it. The results so far have surpassed the average anticipations from when remote working was first executed. Going without mentioning is the e – family of online services; such e-learning, e-commerce, quickly picked up and different platforms revamped their online activity to sell more.  


Predictive Analytics Lab CEO Timothy Oriedo gives a keynote address on Technology and The future of Accounting Practice to a mammoth audience of 600 participants of ICPAK KENYA

Data science was not left behind. For months, online tutors have offered virtual trainings and boot camps on machine learning, programming and data science, providing mentorship to less experienced Data Scientists. For months, e-services have provided a platform for constant learning and self-equipping with certified Data Science programs.

After experiencing the pros and cons of the remote-work setup, many large Companies are considering to let their employees continue to work remotely if they want to. Facebook , Twitter and Predictive Analytics Lab are examples of Companies that announced changes to allow their employees to work remotely indefinitely.

Regardless of how long COVID-19 remains a threat, majority of the workforce in the Information Technology says they plan to work from home permanently. In this article, we will share a few resources you can freely use to ask questions, keep up with new tools in Data Science and join the community of like-minded people.


Predictive Lab trainer Lilian displays her screen while teaching the class on how to make a robot , during a virtual robotic and programming class for juniors

Discord Communities

Having an almost similar interface to WhatsApp and the hash-tag operationability of Twitter, Discord connects a global audience to freely share snippets of what they think of particular topics. The ‘Discord servers’ which would loosely translate to the ‘hash-tags’, are organized into topic-based channels where you can collaborate, share, and just talk about your work talk about your day without clogging up a group chat as WhatsApp.

An example of the Discord servers/ ‘hash-tags’ to engage in

A quick example of these servers would be the Data share server owned by Towards Data Science. Hopping on to this Discord server will equip you with concepts and ideas on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning Machine Learning using Kaggle Datasets and much more. You could put your online scroll time to a wrathful use by joining this community or you could help others along their learning path .

Register at https://events.predictiveanalytics.co.ke/ to be part of our Live Virtual Meetups,Bootcamps and Conferences

Another Discord server would be Data Science which is an active, cohesive group of Data Scientists from different industries and academia. The server allows every participant to share their domain expertise, discuss problems, explore the many different disciplines and endless possibilities technology offers in the different professions. This could be a great way of connecting with IT gurus from across the globe.

Reddit Communities

The Facebook look-alike interface platform is an American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. How Reddit works is users post content organized according to subjects on boards called “subreddits”. Here, they either get voted up or voted down by ‘Redditers’ and the most popular subreddit appears at the top search. Among the most popular Data Science subreddits are:

  • r/MachineLearning — A Machine Learning community
  • r/MLQuestions — A place for beginners to ask any kind of questions and get experts to help them.
  • r/learnmachinelearning — A subreddit dedicated to learning machine learning.

Quora Communities

Like Wikipedia’s user generated answers, Quora works as a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, followed, and edited by Internet users, either factually or in the form of opinions. It serves as a great place to gain and share knowledge. Two major topics you could follow on Quora where you can follow or post your own Data Science or machine learning questions would be Quora’s Machine Learning topic and Quora’s Data Science topic.

Predictive Lab Introduction to Data Science Student Caspah Lidiema Sharing his screen during a live Virtual class presentation on Kiva Dataset

Five Thirty Eight

While it began as a polling aggregation website, Fiver Thirty Eight also denoted as 538, over the last twelve years grew to becoming a data science blog that uses statistical analysis to tell compelling stories about politics, sports, science, economics and culture. While being American based, the blog can be pretty insightful to how you can use it for your personal analyses.

R-bloggers

For learners using R as their primary Data Science language, R-bloggers — is a blog to follow. Embedded in their blog name, R-bloggers constantly has R news and tutorials contributed by R experts. This can be a very good place familiarising yourself with what is happening in the R ecosystem.

A Screenshot of the 4IR Club Platform which has Data Science Content

A New Way Forward

When working from the office, nothing sounds as good as a day spent indoors watching your favorite movies and while working from home, you ponder about making jokes with your co-workers. Though the pandemic may have been the catalyst for remote work for many millions of employees around the world, it’s far from the only reason to work from home since it has been the dream of many for several years.

 Whichever way, it’s central to choose an environment that you will be most successful in since one person’s productivity booster can be another’s distracting disaster. However, learning to focus in any surrounding is a valuable life skill that will help in your career growth. If you settle on working from  home, then you will have to research on the possibilities and develop the skills required for many of these jobs.

So what are you waiting for? With the right skills, you could be working at home in 2020 and beyond.

Finally, you can Enroll for Data Science Courses or follow our Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and Instagram pages or subscribe to our newsletter for constant updates.

Also drop us an email at sales@predictiveanalytics.co.ke for any questions

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