So it Seems as if I Don’t Know How to use Linkedin…
Wow…
So I made a Linkedin account last week right? I go on, connect with a bunch of folks, as you do. Then I decided I’d like to post something since I’ve done some cool stuff recently that I’d like to share. Well…Turns out there’s a character limit on Linkedin that I was completely ignorant of!
Professor Google tells me that the character limit is 700 characters. Clearly, I didn’t think there’d be a limit. Before I started typing away I didn’t even think I’d exceed any limit if one were to even exist. So here we are. If you don’t know, now you know.
I find it funny that I talk about not being much of a writer, and yet, when I do sit down and type some stuff out, some of the feedback I get (from people and the computer now too apparently) essentially boils down to, “Hmm, does it need to be so long?” I know a high word count doesn’t necessarily translate to high quality but seriously, I’d appreciate any and all feedback!
Anyway, here’s a solid copy/paste from what I naively, yet hilariously tried to submit as my first post on Linkedin!
Well, it’s been quite an eventful week! Within roughly the last 7 days I’ve taken big first steps in 3 completely new areas.
First time using Linkedin!
I’ve stayed away from this platform ever since it came out under the belief that networking is an unnecessary chore. Thankfully, there’s been a shift in mindset. It is in fact, necessary. It’s necessary to connect, to share, to enlighten, and in turn become enlightened. I haven’t found another focused platform in which I can interact with so many other individuals in and out of my industry with a mutual intent to simply help. At least, that’s my approach. It was and still is a chore when your thought process of ‘networking’ is to meet only the specific people that you’ve determined can give you the most benefit and generate a manufactured relationship in order to attain it. I find that way of thinking disingenuous, disrespectful, and to put it one way, ain’t nobody got time for that.
Medium publication!
I published my first ever article on Medium and it got picked up by the folks at Towards Data Science! I know for some of you this can be a daily or weekly occurrence, but I’ve never quite fancied myself as a writer and honestly dreaded writing an article covering my projects, or anything really. I just found it hard to believe that people would actually care or value what I had to say when there are so many other more talented people out there than myself. In the end, I was glad I put it out there. I just tried to create something that I wish I had as a resource when learning QGIS for the first time and how I applied it to a project in a unique way. Having editors reach out to me from publications that I’ve consumed on an almost daily basis for the last few years was a big confidence boost so pardon me while I celebrate this small win!
Published dataset on Kaggle!
Ok, so Kaggle isn’t ‘completely’ new to me. I’ve used it quite a bit over the last few months as a resource to find datasets and practice my data science skills. This time though I published a dataset of my own to contribute to the data science community! First, I wrote a web scraper with Selenium to gather lyrics (Responsibly and considerately, might I add. Scrape responsibly friends!) and other data such as the track/album titles, views, and links, then output the data into multiple file formats so that users would be able to use whichever works best for their project. I could’ve used an API but I wanted to use this as an exercise in building and structuring a scraper and plan to gather via API at scale in the future. It’s nothing crazy, it’s literally just Drake lyrics, but I’m planning on using them for another project, and while I have it, I thought I could contribute to the Kaggle community to be used for interesting NLP projects!
So there you have it. Again, these are first steps for me. They may not be incredibly impressive, and I’m okay with that. As Spotify pushes me a notification of the years listening habits I’m reminded of a line that the top artist is known for saying -
“Started from the bottom now we’re here.”
