Why this blog?

It all started when I read an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled "Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century." A light bulb went off in my head as I realized that this was a field I wanted to learn more about, as the core skills of analysis, programming, and presentation that are required to be a successful data scientist are activities I enjoy and am actually pretty good at.

Since then, I've been reading a lot about the field and trying to get my hands dirty in the tools I haven't used yet, while continuing to learn about statistics and visualization. This blog is meant to help me with that. The specific goals of this blog are:

1. Give myself a chance to do more experimentation with data analysis and visualization
2. Force myself to be more rigorous in my thought experiments and data  projects... I've started projects only to put them on hold when something more interesting came up or things got too busy at my day job
3. Share my experiences with others who may also be new to the field, in the hope that they might be able to learn from me
4. Explore Excel-based visualizations as an alternative to some of the packages that are out there

I hope you enjoy reading and maybe learn something from my journeys in data science.