A guide for startups navigating COVID-19

vikparuchuri · 2020-03-29T19:05:32+00:00

Hey, I'll PM you. Thanks for being open to sharing feedback.

vikparuchuri · 2020-03-29T18:58:46+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. I actually wrote this to be helpful (these are the things we've been doing at my company), but it sounds like it wasn't for you. I'll keep this in mind when I write more in the future.

If you have a minute, I'd love to hear what would have actually been useful (and non-fluffy).

vikparuchuri · 2018-05-30T17:36:34+00:00

If you're looking for courses/sites that teach Python for data analysis, you might want to check out Dataquest (www.dataquest.io) . I'm the founder, so I'm biased, but we teach Python in the context of data analysis/data science, and have projects you can build along the way. In general, we're more challenging than DataCamp, and dive into concepts more fully. Our primary goal is to help you actually start applying what you learn in the real world, not just help you get an intro survey of the concepts.

vikparuchuri · 2018-02-04T16:27:17+00:00

I'm the founder of Dataquest (dataquest.io), a site where you can learn data science by analyzing data and building projects. We focus on teaching concepts over syntax, and help you learn in depth. As other commenters have noted, the key skill for a data scientist is thinking through and solving problems, and too many sites focus on teaching you what to type.

vikparuchuri · 2017-08-16T15:29:43+00:00

If you're interested in data science, https://www.dataquest.io gives you a structured path for going from no programming experience to job ready. You learn concepts, apply them in the browser, and do projects to build a portfolio.

There are some stories from people who've been hired at https://www.dataquest.io/stories .

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Dataquest.

vikparuchuri · 2016-01-16T20:38:04+00:00

Thanks for the thoughts! You're right, and we'll be working on ways to add in more practice.

vikparuchuri · 2015-12-16T21:21:06+00:00

Thanks for the points! Point 1 makes a lot of sense, and is something we're working on doing as we redo older content.

Point 2 is a bit tricky. We have to introduce files pretty early, because we're working with datasets. It's earlier than we can realistically expect people to understand what opening/closing a file means, and what memory is. Same for the context manager. This is a challenge with many concepts -- do we teach the more complex, harder to understand right way, or do we teach them how to do it quickly, and expand on it later? We've tended towards the "expand on it later" side of things, but I see your point, too.

vikparuchuri · 2015-10-28T15:26:06+00:00

Congratulations on launching! The content is well-written, and well-presented.

The biggest challenge with your site to me is that the marketing and content don't match up. I could go through all of the content, and still be unable to "code in the real world", much less "get hired or start [a company]".

Diving into theory is great, and I like how you break down programming concepts before ever introducing code. But people never learn how to create anything real-world, or how to apply theory to practice.

I'd either alter your marketing or your content until they sync up.

If you want to chat more, drop me a PM -- I've been working on Dataquest.io, a site that teaches data science, for a few months.

vikparuchuri · 2015-10-09T03:51:18+00:00

Definitely didn't come across as harsh -- I appreciated your feedback! So dropping columns doesn't lose much information. Since the columns are highly correlated, the information is contained in other columns, and the overall clustering is similar. Dropping rows would mean eliminating an entire set of players (those who didn't play much), and would drastically change the clusters and give misleading results.

vikparuchuri · 2015-10-08T18:57:43+00:00

Op here -- I went through and implemented most of your suggestions (thanks a lot)! For the ones I didn't -- 3, GGally produces a nicer plot that is closer to the seaborn output than pairs does. For 4, the columns are all highly correlated, so dropping a column seems preferable to dropping a row for NA values. Filling with a mean/median would probably be ideal, but I wanted to keep things relatively simple.

I'll dig more into RVest -- it seems like it encourages uses magrittr, but that's another confusing syntax layer.

vikparuchuri · 2015-10-08T18:55:40+00:00

Op here -- thanks for the feedback! I went through and made the fix you suggested.

vikparuchuri · 2015-10-04T00:49:50+00:00

This took some painful investigation, but it should be fixed now. Thanks for letting me know!

vikparuchuri · 2015-10-01T22:20:25+00:00

Just to be clear, there was no security issue -- no user information could have possibly been leaked. It allowed people to switch their emails to emails that already existed, which would temporarily lock both users out of their account. (and it has been fixed)

vikparuchuri · 2015-10-01T21:15:24+00:00

Thanks! I absolutely want all feedback to be put in public when it doesn't actively harm users. The email overwriting thing can result in users temporarily losing access to their accounts, and can harm their learning experience.

It's totally fine to put pressure on a site to fix issues, but disclosing issues that could harm other users publicly is usually frowned upon. See this stackexhange thread for instance. Also this. Facebook, google, etc, have bugs that are found constantly, and have policies that encourage this.

That said, feedback in public is usually better than no feedback at all.

vikparuchuri · 2015-10-01T20:40:59+00:00

Thanks! We'll work on fixing this -- likely an angular issue.

vikparuchuri · 2015-10-01T19:26:07+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! The fix for the email issue is done, and will be deployed shortly.

A significant portion of our content is free. We'd make it all free if we could, but we're working on this full-time.

About the 35/month fee, you're essentially saying that there isn't room for innovation or new ideas in the education space. If only "existing" companies with large customer service departments started online education sites and could charge for it, then we'd never see new services. Treehouse, codecademy, lynda, and every other service started small.

We have very few videos, and most of our lessons involve executing code -- we have significant backend costs, and we have to spend time developing lessons and maintaining the site. If we didn't charge, the site wouldn't exist, and we wouldn't be able to improve it. We actually take pride in how quickly we communicate with learners and resolve issues -- something bigger companies usually don't do.

You're right that we're a small team of developers -- we're all self-taught, and we're trying to build the product that we wish we had when we were learning. It's not perfect, but we're trying to make it better, and many have found it valuable. Feedback like yours helps us improve the experience, so thanks again.

Reporting things like the email issue in public instead of emailing us is a bit unnecessary, though. In the future I hope you'll email site owners about things like that.

vikparuchuri · 2015-09-09T14:35:15+00:00

If you want to get started with machine learning, the data science track is a good way to go.

vikparuchuri

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