I’ve taken on more teaching/presenting gigs than normal during the last month. On Tuesday my friend Sara Bates and I held an Introduction to Data Science workshop for Girl Develop It Boulder (a code-focused meetup targeted at women, but open to all).

We were (pleasantly) surprised to have a large turnout and a sizeable wait list. There are so many people interested in breaking into data, and it was nice to demystify the field and make it approachable.

The four main topics we covered were exploratory data analysis, machine learning (mostly supervised learning), A/B testing, and data visualization. Of course, this was all at a very high level because we only had two hours. But we tried to make it all concrete with real examples, code samples, and lots of interaction. The slides1 are here.

  1. I’ve started using reveal.js for slides, and mostly love it so far. The math text looks beautiful, the syntax highlighting is nice, and overall the slides look simple and elegant. ↩