We’re always working on ways to help you learn and keep you motivated — from new features, to celebrating student stories. In this post, we give you a quick overview of what we’ve released recently, and what’s coming up.
This month we’re celebrating passion, and finding data in the things you love. We’re focusing on nature data, check out our related posts (and grab a discount!) here.
Takeaways
Programming is comprised of many small actions and concepts, and it can be hard to remember all of them. Inevitably, you’re left wondering, “Wait, what does == do, again?” (It returns True if both values are equivalent.) There’s Google and documentation, of course, but then you have to hunt through pages of information — breaking your concentration and taking up time.
Enter our Takeaways. As you finish your missions in our Python Programming: Beginner and Python Programming: Intermediate courses, you’ll find downloadable documents with handy information such as:
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How to open a file
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How to iterate over a list
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How to determine whether a value exists in a list
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If statement syntax
You can keep these Takeaways nearby, and quickly refer back to them when you get stuck. While they’re only found in the Python Beginner and Intermediate courses so far, we’re hard at work adding them to the rest of our directory.
If you haven’t yet, also check out our cheat sheets:
R Programming: Intermediate
We continue to work on building out our R courses, and hope you enjoy the newest one: R Programming: Intermediate. This course includes coverage of control structures, functions, and strings and dates.
User stories
We’ve added a few new stories to our user success page:
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Eric wanted to build stronger, deeper data skills. Learn how he went from data mining to data science.
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Mike didn’t expect to fall in love with data. His story speaks to everyone who finds themselves bored with their prospects.
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Christian’s tale shows how important it is to find a project you care about. He credits Dataquest with the job he has today.
Are you in a job you love and feel that Dataquest helped? Let us know!
New team members
At Dataquest, we work hard to find the right people as we grow our organization. We look for people passionate about education, who will thrive on our fully distributed team. We’re excited to introduce you to our newest hires:
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Shridhar Gupta, Frontend Engineer: Shridhar is passionate about great design and engineering. He loves traveling to new places, spending time in the outdoors, and doing photography.
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Rose Martin, Data Scientist: Before Dataquest, Rose worked as an ecosystem ecologist. She’s passionate about helping others develop their data science skills and make their own discoveries.
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Randall Hall, Content Operations: Randall is a self-described math and data geek.
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Ash Kestrel, Backend Engineer: Ash has a background in animation, and enjoys working in Python.
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Karl Taylor, Director of Marketing: Karl enjoys old books, kitschy quips, and delectable sandwiches.
Other updates
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We recently migrated from AWS to Google Cloud. Many thanks to all our students for their patience with the downtime involved. We made the change in order to improve site speed and reliability of service, as well as to make ongoing maintenance easier.
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Several of us attended PyCon US in mid-May. The Python community was very welcoming, and we enjoyed meeting so many people passionate about data and programming.
What should we build next?
Feedback from our users is really important to us — we’d love to get your take on what we should build next. If you have an idea, you can e-mail us or get in touch on Twitter!