Why I am Learning Web Development as a Data Scientist
The pros (without cons).
A few months ago I started my new job as a Data Science consultant at an IT consulting company.
While I thought my skills were sufficient to take on projects, I was completely wrong.
Our customers expect Data Science consultants also to have web dev technologies, which I didn't see coming.
While web development is an interesting and fun field, I rarely looked into it because why? I am a Data Scientist!!! (I was wrong)
But, learning to implement a web app isn't only valuable for my day-to-day job.
The Benefits of Learning Web Development
- Become more valuable by stacking more skills: You can take on a wider range of projects, making you valuable for your (future) company.
- Freelancing: Talking to a few Data Science freelancer colleagues, having web development skills next to your (hopefully) strong Data Science skills makes you more valuable for freelancing projects. Being able to single-handedly build more and more components for a client’s project is worth many $$$.
- Building a portfolio: I know, there are tons of free templates and low-code services to create your portfolio page. But, isn’t it cool to build your portfolio page like you want? Without being restricted in the visuals?
- Talking about portfolios - you can make your portfolio/side projects more accessible by creating a web app around your ML models. This is a huge upgrade in comparison to showing your GitHub repository. Your recruiter probably doesn’t even know what GitHub is.
- Building even non-DS-related web apps is fun. You can transform any idea in your head into code and let other people use it, which doesn’t have to be an ML project every time. Do you want to build a better version of an existing product you use? Go for it.
How I am learning
In my studies, I was confronted with HTML/CSS/JS a bit, but I never used it extensively. Therefore I started the Web Developer Bootcamp by Colt Steele 2 weeks ago. It gives you a great overview of important concepts and goes into in-demand frameworks like React. Of course, doing this course doesn’t transform you into a pro, but it teaches you the fundamentals and gives you a direction on where to go next.
Conclusion
While learning a new field is challenging, I know that it is a great investment for you. Becoming more valuable, more versatile and having more fun are worth going through the challenges :)