Software Engineering for Data Scientists
18 Jan 2024What is Software Engineering?
Software engineering is a blanket term used to describe the process or approach of solving a problem through analysis, program design, implementation of the solution into code, testing the functionality the program, deploying the program, and lastly ensuring it is maintanable or able to be understood by others in case they might need adapt it to better suit their own purposes in the future. Although one might think of software engineering as something only done by companies like Meta or Airbnb, it used by virtually everyone who wants to solve a problem or complete a task using software.
Why I started My Journey in Data Science and A.I
When it comes to my career and what I want to do in life, I aspire to be a machine learning engineer and work with A.I in general. This was because I was amazed by the wide ranging applications of machine learning to create functionality in applications that wouldn’t be practical otherwise and how it can be used to effectively parse through data to generate new insights. I discovered that I wanted to pursue data science and machine learning because the more I learned about different topics and academic disciplines the more patterns and connections I found between them, similar to machine learning models. Learning how everything is interconnected and how they influence each other allowed me to better appreciate the world I live in and evoked my passion for learning. Data science and machine learning would help me work with my passion because I could utilize machine learning applications to analyze data and discover novel insights about different disciplines due to virtually everything having the capacity to be represented as data.
Why Software Engineering Matters in Data Science
Software engineering is critical to utilizing machine learning and A.I in real world problems. Part of being a software engineer is learning to identify and undestand the problem you are solving for, either through analysis or by talking to clients. Data analytics follows a similar methodology to software engineering with the main difference being how to collect and use data to solve a problem rather than creating software. Therefore, as a data scientist, learning software engineering is essential to help you create practical applications using machine learning and reinforce your data analysis skills from the similar structured approach to solving a problem or task.