She Code Africa Mentoring Program — 3 Months down
What I learnt in the last month of the Program
The last month of the She Code Africa Mentoring Program was the most thrilling because I learnt new things while building my final project but my laptop had to be formatted due to some issues. Despite everything, I’m happy that I was able to learn and also submit my project.
This article is a summary of what I learnt in the last month of the program.
Learning Path:
- Machine Learning
- Software Engineering
- Data Science Project
Machine Learning
Machine learning is an application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that provides systems with the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed.
Machine learning algorithms are classified as supervised or unsupervised. I learnt two machine learning algorithms; K-Nearest Neighbors and Linear Regression algorithm.
Software Engineering
I learnt this using Data Camp’s Software Engineering course. Software Engineering concepts in the course are; modularity, documentation and testing.
Programming becomes less complex when your code is divided into smaller functional units. Modular code is readable and easy to maintain.
When I revisit old projects, it’s usually difficult to understand the code if documentation was not involved. Comments and docstrings are used to document python projects. To view a function’s documentation, “help()” is used - It entails the description of the function, it’s parameters and what is expected as output.
Data Science Project
This is where I leveraged what I learnt throughout the program.
For my final project, I planned on performing an Exploratory Data Analysis on a dataset and also building a Machine Learning model using either K–Nearest Neighbors or Linear Regression algorithm but something felt off when I finished building the model.
I expected that when I was done “building the model” and testing it, there would be some kind of user interface where I would input values and the model would give me a diagnosis or something but this wasn’t so. I reached out to my mentor and explained the situation and she said that I would have to develop a Web Application using Flask or Django and then link it to the model. I guess that’s what bought about the final phase of my project.
I shared the steps that I followed in building a model and deploying it to a Web Application and then to Heroku.
I can attest to the fact that at the beginning of the year I did not know how to do a majority of the things listed in my articles, but my awesome mentor Ifeoma Okoh exposed me to these concepts in Data Science. The program has ended but Learning continues and I’ll definitely give back to the community.
A Big Thanks to Ifeoma Okoh [it was nice working with you and learning from you] and She Code Africa [for giving me this platform to learn and grow].
