I recently did a little project to find out what makes a company tick, using Python and the Twitter API. It has to be done quickly, in like a day, and didn’t need to be overly complicated.
One of the biggest hurdles I’ve found when teaching myself any sort of SQL/Python/Data Wrangling skills is the problem of finding usable, real life data to work with. Data that I can actually attempt to answer questions with.
Yeah, Web Scraping is super easy in Python, just pip install BeautifulSoup and away you go. Not.
Hmmm…. What to use… What to use? When I want to explore data quickly and with the least amount of pain, the first problem I face is where do I start. There are a million approaches and I’m usually thinking long-term, ease of maintenance, surrounding platform, etc etc.