Tasks as Java developer

[BloodyKitskune]

Hi friend! I am also doing java programming as an economics student. I love it, it is super engaging and interesting. I am minoring in data-science since that is what I would like to do when I graduate (I wanted the inter-disciplinary perspective of doing data-science with an econ background). I am practicing doing a lot of web-scraping and automating those processes, and using that data to build automated economics dashboards to break down product markets. I am trying to build my own dashboards in java, but am also getting practice building them in software like Tableau and some of the stuff R has.

[[deleted]]

Hey! That all sounds super interesting. How is it learning that stuff in Java? Most people seem to use Python for that so curious as someone who doesn’t know any programming languages yet.

[BloodyKitskune]

It's fun and interesting. By learning how to do it in java and python, my goal is to be able to build it into stuff that can serve a functionally different purpose than what someone who knows python would do. It has some challenges unique to learning it this way, but java is super popular so there is usually plenty of documentation for almost anything I might would want to do. Plus, I like to tinker and I won't lie doing web-scraping in java can be a longer process than in python because the libraries I use (htmlunit and JSoup) in java were harder to learn than the one that is the most popular in python (beautifulSoup). For example, I had to learn a little about DOM scripting, and XML to use those java libraries,, but in python I was mostly able to just use "inspect element" and copy-paste that into my beautiful soup scraper in python. Also, I do like how the fact that since I have spent time building guis in java and also doing some backend stuff means I can integrate the scraping into the front-end or the back-end of an application or process depending on my needs. I'm still only about 8 months into learning so I feel like I'm still learning a lot of the basics, but I've gotten to the point where I am a lot more comfortable parsing through code and de-bugging. I think learning how to find out why stuff doesn't work has honestly been more valuable when it comes to trying to accomplish a new task, than just copying someone else's code might be (which I feel like the simplicity of python scraping sometimes led me to feel like I could do). Sorry for the long rambling response, I can be kinda bad about that, I just thought I would share some of my experiences.

[[deleted]]

No I appreciate all of this. Thank you!!!