2017 Report Card
2017 was a year of learning, relearning and reading. My goal this year was to expand my knowledge and learn new skills. I was able to learn few skills such as how use python to write codes to do host of things as well as R which is a programing language developed for statisticians, and others interested in data.
I learned those skills by taking courses from Audacity, Udemy and by subscribing to safarionline. com. Audacity provides high quality materials for anyone desiring to learn how to program and so is udemy. At the time when I was enrolled in Audacity course, they had one-on-one tutors you can schedule to help you figure out specific programing issues.
Udemy has cheap and affordable courses on various technology subject. It is great place to start learning basic programing skills.
Safaribooksonline.com is subscription based online books and tutorials on technology. You can find popular books on technology in the website as well as quality video tutorial. I learned how to scrap data from webpages using BeautifulSoup from videos and books on this website.
The most difficult concept for me was looping, for and while loop. Looping means going through list of steps, data until you get your desired result. For example, you can loop through this writing to finds all the words which contain emotions. The program will go through each line and continue in this process until it finds all desired output. It goes as: for x in m where m is content of my writing and x are individual words in m, if x==happy, print(x).
As part of the learning process, I joined a local meet up group in Rochester mostly made of engineers at IBM, Mayo Clinic, freelancers and geeks who find joy in abstraction. I learned from this group generators and regular expression. Regular express are great tools for scraping data from website. It is pattern matching system designed to isolate data that meets your desired pattern. For example, an email consist of lower case letters, @. com, you can use this pattern to obtain e-mail addresses from million of rows datasets.
If you really want to learn something new, join a meet up groups in your local city. It is a great way to meet liked-minded people and remain motivated to learn a new skill. It is not easy to learn somethings, as host of things will most likely interfere with your plans, but with meet up you are sure to remain engaged in learning.
In addition to programmings, I enrolled into a communications course offered by Harvard Business Review. This communication course help me understand my weakness in communication, and learn how to (1) Persuade (2) negotiate (3) write and (4) present ideas. You will never go wrong in taking a communication course as we all need to improve our abilities to communicate with other humans.
I subscribed to New Yorker and maintained subscription for Harvard business review. New Yorker is the best writing you can find anywhere. The stories in the New Yorker are well-written, and for aspiring a writer, it the best way to learn the craft.
Harvard business review provides insights in the business world. My best articles were mainly on marketing and understanding human reaction to products and services. Value preposition, why do we value a product or service over another, and how can we position a product and services to satisfy the needs of customers -aesthetic needs.
On the influence of HBR, I conducted my personal studies to taste preference of hotels, and cookies. For hotels, the deal breaker for me is the quality of the shower over all the other things. Great hotels choose the best shower items to appeal to the aesthetic of customers. My favorites is Raddison followed by the Marriott brands.
I continue experiment on issues of perception and testing it in the field. One way, I have done was presenting different versions of me-Faisal, normal looking person, suited Faisal and others versions of Faisal to test how people perceive me. In conclusion, most people love jerks and the arrogant type to who want everyone in the room to know " a lawyer is in the room" or " somebody with a title is in the room"
It breaks heart to see human values the person over the accessories that is visibly present such as title, choice of address and others rather the core value of the person such as being 'human'
Finally, I read fiction and nonfiction work. Most of my choices for fiction were often based on the quality of the writing rather the story. I love fiction writers who use language to create something awesome. Most of my nonfiction readings were in areas of business, psychology, science and one biography by President Jimmy Carter.