It’s now June, and I’ve been at this for just over a month. I’m about 75% through the Data Science from Scratch book, and my database class at UNLV starts next Monday. The reading has been going well, even though it has been a bit slow because I’ve still got some curriculum stuff that I need to work on for the department. I’m looking forward to being done with that because it is a distraction and it does keep me from focusing on what I want to focus on.

I’ve also been in contact with one of my colleagues that might have a data project for me to start playing with. I don’t anticipate that the coursework will be hugely overwhelming, so I’m expecting to have some space to play with that.

I’m pleased with the COVID data visualization, even if the code itself ended up being a bit sloppy and probably could have been massaged a bit. I somewhat wish that I was able to find a useful database of county sizes so that I could display that information and help contextualize the numbers a bit further. After doing more reading, it seems that I should be learning to use canvas instead of SVG. So I may go look around and do that at some point.

Just the process of building this blog has been good, including the minor customizations that I’ve created. I would kind of like to see if I can replace the tag pages with something in JavaScript, but that could end up being a rather lengthy thing because I’ll have to figure out how to dump all of the information in a way that I can capture it in the code. But that’s just something that I’m letting stew in the back of my mind.

Overall, I’m pleased with my progress up to this point and am looking forward to some of the formalized learning opportunities I have in front of me.