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Today we have the pleasure to meet Davide, a 33-year-old Big Data student. Davide has a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy, an area that apparently has nothing to do with data analysis. This makes him an interesting profile. Just after graduation, he decided to travel abroad to improve his English skills. He ended up living in Great Britain for seven years, mostly in Liverpool. After being involved in several unskilled jobs, Davide joins one of the best known companies in the world, Amazon. That’s where Davide finds inspiration to embark on a new life and professional journey.
Davide, what brought you here at the Geeks Academy?
My relationship with computers began many years ago. As a gamer, I have always interacted with consoles and PCs. I reckon my classmates in middle school used to ask for help when they encountered issues with their PCs or laptops. Despite that, my passion for humanities prevails. I've got a Classic Lyceum Diploma and then I had a Bachelor's degree in philosophy. Due to job placement issues in Italy, I decided to briefly move to England to improve my English skills. The short trip turned into a seven-year expedition. Just after six months in London, I moved to Liverpool and started taking unskilled jobs. Cleaner, dishwasher, cook, until I made a decision: I needed a change and some fresh air. And so I took an opportunity and joined Amazon. I ended up working there for three years. Starting from the bottom, I learned everything there is to know within a multi-millionaire giant. The last year has been the most interesting: by successfully passing a pre-selection process, I had the privilege to join an apprenticeship in business management. During that journey, I took on a QA supervisor role. This is when my idle interest in IT awakened. By working on databases with a huge amount of data, I realized that it was indeed time to take a leap. Nothing happens by chance and, after many years, I felt I’ve achieved all my goals in that country. So I moved back to Italy and started to look for IT courses. I was aware of all the opportunities and new jobs around the web3 area, so after searching online, I chose to get a course in Data Analysis. That’s how I found Geeks Academy. And now here I am at the end of my Big Data Junior Professional course.
From philosophy to big data. So the next question is: how do you feel? How is your Big Data journey going?
Amazing! It is a fascinating experience. I started from scratch with computer science foundations and Linux basics. Then I moved to principles of programming, so I finally had the chance to test Python, an OOP (object-oriented programming) language, one of the most trending programming languages in recent years. The immediacy and intuitive logic behind Python have gladly washed away any kind of uncertainty and insecurity. The fear was blown away by the excitement of writing my first lines of code. That made the Python learning curve enjoyable. We've been covering Python and many of its libraries for a few months, going from basic functions with NumPy to data cleaning & exploration with Pandas. We made predictions with algorithms, thanks to Scikit-Learn, and then deep learning with TensorFlow and Keras. However, what took my interest more than anything else was the data visualization module with MatPlotLib and SeaBorn libraries. Making plots and bar graphs make me feel like a craftsman who shapes any kind of material. So I'm now able to confidently work on databases with thousands (if not millions) of rows and columns. Just after Python, I moved on to relational and non-relational database management systems (DBMS). From SQL language to semi-structured or unstructured databases, the so-called non-relational databases. A complex concept in appearance but once I got in touch with MongoDB, a document-oriented database management system, knots were unraveled. By comparing those systems, I understood the use cases of both platforms and became aware of what makes SQL and MongoDB different. Despite the charm of these last modules, I’ve been always thinking of data visualization. And so in the past weeks I've started using Tableau and it's been love at first sight.
Fantastic! Tableau is in fact the business intelligence market leader, having a market share greater than Microsoft's PowerBI with approximately 32,000 companies daily using it. Impressive numbers. Tell us your first impressions about this innovative software.
It seems to me a very intuitive and user-friendly software. Tableau's key feature lies in the drag & drop function: I open an Excel database file, for instance, and drag one of the database fields onto the workspace and the graph immediately appears on the screen. Simple as that, it's really that easy! Thanks to Tableau, I realized that my passion is visualization, bringing life to an infinite amount of data.
Thanks for your time, Davide. Do you have a message for our readers and for those who are willing to work within Big Data?
Don't be afraid, you can do it! My philosophical background has not been an issue in any way. If you are curious, keen to learn and hungry for new technologies, go for it. You will not regret it.