

Ask HN: How to get into Data Science as a hobby? - jxm262

I&#x27;ve been programming for about 4 years now (full-stack web) and had a couple previous years doing Database related work (PLSQL, Oracle apps).<p>After taking a few coursera classes on the subject I&#x27;m don&#x27;t know where to turn now.  I had a few classes in college which touched on this (data mining, stats, etc.) but never had any real world projects.<p>I&#x27;m curious..<p>1. Where can I find side projects to work on which I could apply my beginner knowledge of the field. (end goal to learn more with practical work)<p>2. How can I use my background in web development to help advance in this field?<p>Any advice is appreciated
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beamatronic
Data is all around you. Find a data set about a subject that you are
passionate about. I mean passionate in the sense that you have BURNING
questions about it. Let's say you are into movies. You can find data sets of
movies. I would pose these queries to you as exercises:

1\. What is the average length of all movies?

2\. Here are some buckets: Movies that are under one hour, movies that are
between 1 and three hours, and movies that are three hours or longer. Tell me
how many movies are in each bucket.

3\. I want to know if movies are getting longer or shorter over time. Find out
and show me a graph.

edit: formatting

