Half Stack Data Science

A reminder that David's book, Solve Any Data Analysis Problem, is out later this year and you can already buy it and read it in its draft form as part of Manning's Early Access Program. If you want to practise your data skills on real world problems and learn a reusable framework to use on any project in the future, this book is for you.

Find out more here: https://www.manning.com/books/solve-any-data-analysis-problem

Now onto today's episode. We're continuing our series of conversations about data education and in this episode we spoke to Richie Cotton.

Richie is a data evangelist at DataCamp. He started his career as a data scientist, working in industries from chemical health and safety to debt collection to proteomics. After joining DataCamp in 2016, he switched to teaching data and AI skills. He has created ten courses on data science that have been taken by over 700k learners, and worked with instructors to create over 50 courses that have been taken by millions of learners. Richie has also written two books and R programming, Learning R and Testing R Code.

In his current role, Richie hosts the DataFramed podcast and runs the DataCamp webinar program, as well as creating tutorials and cheat sheets for data and AI skills.

We spoke to Richie about how DataCamp's offering and focus has changed over time to meet market demands, with some inevitable comments about Python vs R, what the impact of generative AI has been on data education, and what the future holds.

You can find Richie and his work on various parts of the internet:

• Connect with Richie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richierocks
• Listen to the DataFramed podcast: https://www.datacamp.com/podcast
• Attend DataCamp webinars: https://www.datacamp.com/webinars

Continuing our series of conversations with data educators, in this episode we spoke to Valerie Logan.

Founding The Data Lodge in 2019, Valerie is as committed to data literacy as it gets. She believes that in today's digital society, data literacy is not just a work skill- it's a life skill. With advisory services, train-the-trainer bootcamps, an extensive resource library and community services at The Data Lodge, Valerie is certifying the world’s first Data Literacy Program Leads across commercial, nonprofit and public sectors.

In 2022, The Data Lodge was recognized by CDO Magazine as one of the "Top 25 Data Startups to Watch in 2022". Valerie has more than 28 years of experience, including two decades of global consulting across industries, and five years of applied experience in the telecommunications industry at both field and enterprise levels. She holds a B.S. in Math from SUNY College at Buffalo and an M.S. in Applied Math with a concentration in Operations Research from New Mexico State.

We talked to Valerie about how literacy in data is like literacy in any language, how to spread data literacy effectively in a business, what are some obstacles to doing this, how you measure the success of a data literacy program, and of course the effect of the emergence of AI on all of the above. Valerie even made a custom Scrabble board just for this episode, you can see that on our website halfstackdatascience.com

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