Ep. 039, You want chili powder with that?

Matt Phair did not expect to be a data scientist when he was a butcher in his younger days. But after some school and getting some experience he found technology to be a great vehicle for social mobility. Matt talks to us about Peapod Digital Labs using data science to make the shopping experience better. He also shares some suggestions for folks who aspire to become great data scientists or developers.   Matt's show notes: LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/matt-phair Peapod Digital Labs: https://www.peapoddigitallabs.com Heroku: https://www.heroku.com/I’m a huge fan of Heroku! It’s really fast and easy to host a small web app and database for free but it’s also scales really well! I’ve used this for my own personal projects as well as for production apps. In my opinion it’s much easier than AWS or Azure.  Coursera: https://www.coursera.org The best education program I’ve done was a data science certificate program through John’s Hopkins. It took about 11 months to complete cost roughly $1,200. This program contributed more to my career than everything I studied at university. This was 8 years ago. The program appears to have been revamped and broken into multiple sub-specializations on Coursera. Here are the three related specializations: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-science-statistics-machine-learning https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-science-foundations-r https://www.coursera.org/specializations/jhu-data-science  Recently I completed a few courses in Coursera’s “Mathematics for Machine Learning” specialization. These courses connect the dots between math and ML/DL.  I really liked them and would also highly recommend: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/mathematics-machine-learning