Hey everyone!
I just started learning to code and decided to start blogging as a way to write down the new knowledge that I just learnt which should help me absorb it better and hopefully help me transition into the tech or data science industry faster.
But before all that, let me introduce myself. My name is Yi Jin, you can call me James. I'm 25 years old (as of the time of writing this) and as you can tell by my online persona, I'm an accountant. I'm currently working in a startup company in Malaysia (the less successful neighbour of Singapore).
The reason why I started to learn coding was because my manager and CEO gave me an opportunity to prepare the company's financial budget for the next financial year and of course, I was thrilled at the opportunity. However, after attempting to do it, I noticed that there was A LOT of manual work involved, mostly in data manipulation. So I thought to myself... is there a way I could automate this? That's where coding came into play.
Before this, I actually did learn some coding but that was just some Excel VBA. In my previous job in a Multi-national company (MNC), I had to do the same thing every day, which was to download a bunch of txt files, copy and paste them into an excel sheet, massage and format the data and this took about 15 to 20 minutes of my day. Just doing it without any thought... That's when I learnt about coding and the wonderful world of TECHNOLOGY~
To be fair, ever since I was a kid, I loved technology and the latest advancements. I used to take apart my computer and learn what all the components do, so I've always been inclined to technology and love surrounding myself with it. But as time flew and my dad brainwashing me to not go into Computer Science because it's too competitive (he was a CS graduate), naïve me listened to him and now I kind of regret it.
Anyways, back to the story, I decided to restart my coding journey for this budgetting project and that's where I thought, maybe Machine Learning & AI could quicken this process a lot. So I did some research on several coding languages and it came between R and Python. I went and got some advice from the tech team in my current company and they suggested for data analysis and forecasting, R is the way to go. After contemplating between the two for a while, I decided to pursue R as my first coding language. As for the reason why, I'll probably do another blog post to talk about it in the future once I have some experience in Python, otherwise it wouldn't be fair.
Alright, I think that's long enough for a first post. I'm practically giving my life story away. Hope you guys enjoyed that read and hope you will join me along my 'Road to Code'.