Just putting it out there, I am flaky when it comes to blogging.
When daily life and routine gets to me, I just simply do not have time nor energy to focus on penning down my thoughts. My most recent attempt at personal blogging/portfolio at the now dead knazran.com was noble but ultimately a failure.
So why start again at blogging?
The answer to that is **focus**
If you noticed, this blog is not just a personal blog. It is a personal data science blog with the sole purpose of documenting my journey towards becoming a data scientist. There is a direction to bring my scattered thoughts together into coherent series of writings and hence an easier time to frame it all together.
But still, why a data science blog?
Teaching Others Greatly Help Retention
Since my high school days, I noticed that my best subjects are all of the subjects I helped my classmates to understand. When I became a teaching assistant for those subjects, my scores went higher. This continues until my university days and has shown success.
To teach another means you have to really understand the subject matter, to break it down and organize it in such way that it makes sense, and to communicate it effectively so it could be understood. This engages the brain in ways that greatly spur retention and understanding and hence, better and faster learning.
Breaking Down Knowledge Silos
I believe in knowledge sharing. I believe that advancements in civilisation are only made possible by building on top of works of those who came before. When knowledge are being kept in air tight silos and inside someone’s head, that knowledge breaks the value chain for civilisation and stops being useful.
Data science is an emerging field with vague definitions, best practices, and lack of structure. I believe that by writing down my insights and sharing what I learn, someone out there will learn from it and use that to further provide value to civilisation.
Sounds noble eh?
The Malaysian Context
A Google search with the query ‘Data Science Malaysia’ gives these results
You can see Data scientist job openings, information on data science university courses and news articles. But where is the information on data science work…in Malaysia? A ground level view of data science in Malaysia, the state of the professions, the unique troubles and challenges, the open source projects? This is related to the knowledge silos point above, these sort of information are not readily available online.
So I will commit some of my resources into writing about trying to be a Data Scientist in Malaysia like how to let your boss understand the value of data, how to managed a simple data science infrastructure, how to identify some of the best practices to do Data science in an organization. Maybe I’ll interview some prominent Data Scientist who is working in Malaysia to give some unique inputs and insights of the profession.
At the end of the day, I have to continue writing
Writing has been and still is the mode of communicating ideas to many different people. I have to properly internalize that and push through my busy schedule and tired muscles to just write and share what I know on Data Science.
Who knows, when I actually made it as a Data Scientist, I can happily look back on my journey and how I grew as a person.