Just completed the Data Analysis for Life Sciences XSeries on EdX, my first MOOC. I had been meaning to learn R for a while as I’ve seen some cool stuff being done with it (I am mainly a Python guy), and to try one of these online courses, and it was very interesting to take a peek into a field of computing that I’ve had no exposure to, biostats. Obv a course like this barely scratches the surface of a very deep and broad area, but it was enjoyable to do and a good foundation for future practice. And most interesting computation these days is really matrix manipulation/LinAlg so all the skills are very transferrable. My first degree was in Mech Eng and a lot of it was familiar once I had dredged it up from memory.

I actually started out doing the Microsoft Professional Program in Data Science a while ago after reading an article in El Reg but got sidetracked; I expect I’ll finish that one up in the next few months too in my copious free time.. The real skills are in the maths so again, all very transferrable, across industries and technology platforms. It’s free too, you only pay if you want the cert at the end.

I should really update this blog more often… My technology work and interests are quite different now than when I started it all those years ago… I am mainly planning to use so-called “data science” to explore some government data, perhaps I will write up what I discover (if anything) here, or if I create any tooling that might be useful to anyone else.