Blog #5 - Days 9 & 10

     Days 9 and 10 both sort of felt like the culmination of a lot of hard work and commitment, but for two very different reasons. 

    On Day 9, I actually did not go into "work" (as I have come to call it), as I had a district semi-final baseball game at Copley High School at two o'clock. Thus, it didn't make sense for me to go to Hawken Project, only to leave an hour later. Still, our baseball team worked hard to get to that point, and so I figured it was worth mentioning in the blog.

    Anyways, back to the more important matters.

    Day 10 was a good day, starting with the fact that seemingly everybody in the office (all six of them!) said something along the lines of "It's gonna be a good day!" within the first hour of my arrival. After setting up my laptop and my monitor (I have two screens now! -- I feel like a professional), I joined Ben and Alex in Ben's office for a meeting with the QA team. It was the typical "What are you going to be doing this week?" meeting. Although I typically find myself lost in the data science lingo whenever I sit in on a meeting at Vertical Knowledge, I was sort of able to follow along in this one, and here's why...

    One of Ben's clients requested a particular data visualization that showed the correlation between two variables on one axis and time on the other axis. This started a debate among the team about how to go about accomplishing this request, and Derrick chimed in by saying that the only way to do that is to graph the r-squared value on the y-axis. When he said the term "r-squared," I immediately perked up because this was something that we had learned in AP Statistics, and when he explained what it meant to the rest of the team, he used the exact wording that I had written on my AP Exam. So that was cool!

    After the meeting, I spent most of the day going over the most important Python concepts before cancelling my free trial on codecademy.com. At this point, I had learned enough about the programming language to accomplish the task that Alex had given me on Day 2. He essentially wanted me to use the merge function to find how many listings on RV Trader were new between 5/1 and 5/8, as well as how many had been purchased or taken down in that time. Thus, after about a week of learning Python, I was able to accomplish this assignment and export two different csv files, one with all the new RVs and the other with the vehicles that had been taken down. 

    Yet another successful day in the working world!

    

A snip of the code Alex and I wrote! Pretty cool!