What is Virtualisation? Have you seen The Matrix? It's a 1999 sci-fi action film that tells the story of a computer hacker named Neo who discovers that the world he lives in is actually a simulated reality, known as the Matrix, created by sentient machines to subdue the human population. If
Cloud Computing for Beginners: What is it and How it Works If someone asks you about cloud computing, what comes to your mind? What is even the Cloud? To tell you the truth, I didn't know what it was, and I was too embarrassed to ask, especially as a millennial. I think there is this perception that because we
What is Command Line? I have expressed my fear of the command line in a couple of my blogs. This fear isn't uncommon. Apparently, it's a common concern among individuals who are new to it. I read somewhere that there is even a term for it! It's terminal
What are Git and GitHub? Should You Learn it? I’m sure in your working life you would have come across a situation that goes something like this: you’re in a team of, say, five people working on a proposal for a new project. The project lead assigns each member a section of the proposal to work on.
API for Beginners For a long time, the API acronym meant one thing to me: Australian Pharmaceutical Industries. It is a health and beauty company in Australia involved in pharmaceutical distribution, retailing and manufacturing. When I worked in pharmacies, I used to order stock from them all the time. The API now dominates
Working With CSV Files in Python After much effort, I finally managed to scrape the data I wanted to use to build my rare disease dashboard, a project inspired by my trip to Germany last year. You can read about the backstory here in this blog: What is Web Scraping and What is it Used for?
What are Regular Expressions, and Why Do We Use Them? When I first delved into web scraping, I came across the term regular expression, commonly referred to as regex. Several videos I'd viewed used regular expression along with BeautifulSoup. Being a curious cat, I couldn't resist looking it up on our wonderful world wide web. But
What is Beautiful Soup? I'm located down under in Australia, and it's scorching hot this time of the year, so it's not a time for soup! But this soup that I'm writing about is different. It doesn't have the ability like the liquid dish
What is Parsing, and Why is it Needed in Web Scraping? A year ago, I had no idea what parse meant. I first heard of the term from a web scraping video. The author said something along the line: "…we need to parse the response from the get request using a parser. There are many types of parsers …." And
Understanding CSS Basics for Web Scraping Many resources I came across on web scraping speak to the need to understand the basics of HTML to web scrape; this doesn't seem to extend to CSS, is the impression I'm getting from my research. With the benefit of hindsight, I think it's
Understanding HTML Basics for Web Scraping Understanding the basics of HTML is a prerequisite to scraping a website, assuming you already have a good foundation in Python. This blog is a follow-on from the earlier blog on What is Web Scraping, and What it is Used for? Why is it a prerequisite? HTML is one of
What is Web Scraping, and What is it Used for? Not long ago, I visited a few of my colleagues in Berlin, Germany. One of my colleagues told me about Pompe disease. It is a rare genetic disorder in which the body cannot break down complex sugars. Our conversation left me pondering all sorts of questions like how little I
What is Recursive Common Table Expression? I have a question for you. What do these three have in common: factorial, Russian doll, and Romanesco? It's been a long time since I left middle school, so if you're struggling to recall what factorial is, like I was, check out math is fun. It&
What is Common Table Expression and When to Use it? My colleague, herein alias M, and I have been working on a project which involves creating a suite of automated dashboards and real-time KPI reporting. We are a duo team. He is the data guy, and I'm the design chick. We complement skills. We bounce ideas off and
Semi-Join & Anti-Join In my previous blog, we covered the common joins you'll likely come across. I also mentioned that there are more, like anti and semi-joins. While these two types of joins aren't as frequently seen as the ones shared earlier, it has been mentioned in several articles
SQL Joins Data are stored in multiple tables in real life. They simply aren't one jumbo table with everything you need. I wish such a thing existed! We often need to link the tables together through a related column. So I'm about to cover one of those essential
Power Query Part 2 In the previous blog, Power Query Part 1, we focused on the E and the L of ETL in Power Query. As promised, in this blog, we will shift our focus to look at the Transform step. There is a whole raft of transform and cleaning commands in Power Query.
Power Query Part 1 If you don't already know, data preparation, including cleaning, is very labour-intensive. Since I've started blogging, I've said this many times, you're probably sick of hearing it, but hopefully, you get the message loud and clear. We spend too much time on
ETL, What is it? My original plan for the week was to blog about cleaning and transforming data using Microsoft Power Query, but I decided to defer it just a tad. I want to cover the topic of ETL first because Power Query is a lightweight ETL. As you deepen your experience in analytics,
4 Cleaning Techniques in Excel Knowing how to clean data in Excel is one of the fundamental skills you need to know well to be an analyst. It’s also relevant if your goal is to become a data scientist. Sure, a data scientist is more likely to clean data using programming languages like Python
What is the difference between structured, semi-structured and unstructured data? There are so many ways of classifying data. Many are familiar with organising it into either quantitative (comprised of numbers) or qualitative (comprised of non-numbers) data. One that many may not be familiar with but is common in a business setting is the distinction between master and transactional data. Master
What is NoSQL? NoSQL has been on my backlog of things to learn. It’s covered in a heavy layer of dust because it’s been there for that long! When I was writing the blog on SQL, I was reminded of it. I’ve been researching and binging on NoSQL content for
Understanding Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) There is A LOT of information in a database. Understanding how database elements interact with each other can be challenging to grasp. We need a visual way to understand how all the separate parts are related and work together. They call this visual representation Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD). Sometimes you
What is SQL? Why Learn SQL? Where to Start? How Long Does it Take to Learn SQL? I first dabbled in SQL about two years ago. My ex was a software engineer. On a few occasions, at my request, he would teach me the basics of database and SQL after dinner. He taught me the fundamentals of relational databases and the different types of joins. He drew
Database Fundamentals In one of my earlier blogs: 5 Essential Technical Skills for Data Analyst, I said that SQL is one of the key skills to learn as a data analyst and data science. Both roles require working with databases a lot. In my current role as a data analyst, I haven&
