Blog #7 - Day 14

    As it turns out, Day 14 was my last day in-person at Vertical Knowledge. With Ben having a busy day on Day 15 and little left for me to do in the office, I will be using Day 15 to begin figuring out how I will present my experience to my peers and teachers. 

    So...Day 14 - what a day it was! I started off by helping Ben check over a dataset for a client. This particular Excel sheet contained information about all hospitals in the country that use the Da Vinci Surgical System. The data was extracted from the Da Vinci website using a web crawler, so all that was left for Ben and me to do was look up several zip codes across the United States and make sure that the hospitals we found matched the information in the Excel file. I checked hospitals in New York City, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Alaska, and Wyoming, and once I was certain enough that all the data in the spreadsheet was correct, he exported the file to the client. 

    After that, I returned to my Python coding/RV Trader project from the previous week and asked Alex to help me figure out how to exclude values of 0 from my "minimum price by region" roll-up. I tried pretty much everything I could think of on Friday, and I always ended up with either zeros in my data or an unwarranted error message. As it turns out, one of my attempts was very close to Alex's solution. I simply needed to define a new variable (called, say, "rvt_51_no_zeros") and set it equal to the data frame when the value in the "price" column was not equal to zero. Although I had previously tried this, I had failed to specify twice which data frame I was talking about, so the program thought I was referring to the column header instead of the actual data contained within the column. That probably sounds very confusing to a non-coder, but the moral of the story is...we figured it out!

    Now, it is time to start thinking about my presentation!

One last look at the office!

My workspace for the past three weeks!