Updating Priors

Originally posted on Metis’ blog. Metis is an accredited data science bootcamp and it’s where I teach the full-time bootcamp. Data scientists are often described as hybrids: part statistician, part computer scientist; part analyst, part strategist. But while we focus on the myriad technical skills that a data scientist should possess, we often overlook one … Continue reading How to improve communication skills for data science interviews

Today we’ll do some operator overloading, or change the behavior of some infix operators (+ and *) for our own handmade classes. There are legitimate reasons for doing so: if adding a behavior for + makes sense for your class, you can improve the readability of your code and make your classes easier to use. … Continue reading Operator overloading in Python; or, how to lose friends and annoy people

Writing technically proficient code on a line-by-line basis is all well and good, but paying attention only to the micro aspect of our code is a recipe for disaster. But oftentimes that’s what we do, especially as beginners. When we’re just starting out, we struggle with learning the tools, jargon and syntax so that we … Continue reading A Shaky Introduction to the SOLID Principles

Before I even tell you about today’s Python tip, I’ll warn you that there are a lot of opinions on the Internet about whether it’s even a good idea to use, so be sure to pick a side and dig in! Anyway, YMMV, and if you’re writing code that needs to be maintained by a … Continue reading Thing people on the Internet have an opinion about: Python’s loop/else

Students, even those with minimal computer science training, don’t often have issues with the concept of a data type when learning Python. A string is put inside a string, and an integer holds an integer; so far, so good. But the primitive data types pose few issues for understanding because students are relying on intuitions … Continue reading A philosophical investigation of data types

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: You don’t actually want to overflow a stack. But if, like me, you get most of your knowledge these days from stackoverflow.com, you may have wondered about the provenance of that website’s name. While I can’t tell you why they called it Stack Overflow per se, I … Continue reading How to overflow a stack