Hi 👋,

Welcome to my May newsletter! Now that I’ve just about adjusted to working from home, this month I’ve tried to establish a more consistent morning routine, starting the day with yoga, journalling and dedicating time to learn before starting work. Check out below for what I’ve been up to!

I’m also excited to announce that we have launched Speakers Live beta this month, if you’d like to find out more, get in touch!

📰Latest Posts

1. Learn to code. Learn Python. : Learning to code but not sure where to start or what to do next? Here's a list of resources to get you started!

You can also find a selection of my articles on Medium.

🔍Top resources

This month’s recommended resources from across the web and beyond!

• Get started with R: This month I started to learn R so asked twitter where I could find some resources and received some fantastic responses! I’ve taken a glimpse at some of the books and courses - R for Data Science and LinkedIn’s Tidyverse course are next on my list once I’ve got to grips with the basics.

  Dr Kerry Parker @_kaparker

  Starting to learn #rstats and enjoying the basics so far! Any courses or tutorials worth checking out? Which R packages are recommended for #datascience?

  May 18th 2020

  5 Retweets18 Likes

• PyDataUK May Talks: With more events now available virtually and recorded for later, it’s great to be able to watch catch up with talks in my own time. This month I really enjoyed the PyDataUK May talks. There were a lot of great resources mentioned including 5 packages to improve python productivity and tips to make pandas more performant. Dealing with large dataframes, I’ve implemented some of the tips already!

• Hidden features of python: This StackOverflow thread includes useful features in python you might not have come across. The thread is a few years old so might be worth checking the features are still accessible in python 3!

🚀Projects

May: launches and learnings…

• Speakers Live: We launched Speakers Live beta this month! 🚀
  Organising meetups it was getting increasingly hard to find speakers from outside of our network. Last summer, the seed was planted for a side project to find a solution for this problem and I brought Craig on board to help bring Speakers Live to life! We built the platform based on an initial survey and invited the survey respondents to be part of the beta!
  If you are looking for speaking opportunities or are an event organiser, check out Speakers Live, or get in touch to find out more!

• Learning R, improving python, keeping notes: This month I have been reviewing python’s statistical toolbox and have recently picked up R, as mentioned above. I’ve not got stuck into any projects in R yet but I’m excited to give it a try! I’ve been note-taking during my learning for reference and to include in a multi-part series I’m working on where I will be introducing data science techniques in python.

📚This month’s reading list

I spent much less time reading this month but both books had me hooked in totally different ways!

#010: Hello World by Hannah Fry ✭✭✭✭✭ Highly recommend checking this one out!

#011: Broken Girls by Simone St James ✭✭✭✭✩

Why am I learning R when I already use python, you might ask. Well, firstly I am starting to work on a new project at work which is written in R so I’m trying to brush up on the basics. But also, you choose the best tool for the job and both programming languages have their advantages!

If you’d like to get in touch, I’d love to hear from you! Send me an email or find me on Twitter!

Take care and see you next month!

Kerry