How to build a compelling data science blog

- Data science jobs require communication skills. The problem is communicating how algorithms work and how you clean your data is not that easy. Even harder is highlighting or showcasing that data science communication skill to a potential employer. A potential solution to this problem is to build a data science blog. I've done this and you can do it too. In this video, I want to share with you the essentials of building a blog. They'll not only help you through technical as well as your communication skills, but also help you network. Now, there are three things to keep in mind when building data science blog. First, you need to find a place to host your blog. The easiest approach is use medium or another blogging platform because you don't have to worry about hosting your own website. It's as easy as creating an account, writing and posting. There is a disadvantage in that the blogging platform you choose can change its business model or try and put things behind a paywall. The other option is to make your own website. I recommend hosting with GitHub Pages and blogging with Jekyll. The added advantage of this is that you can customize your site for your individual needs. Next, you need to find a potential topic to write about. You might be wondering, how do you find a topic to write about? You really write about any data science topic no matter how big or small. For example, you can write about data visualizations, exploratory data analysis, statistics, and machine learning. You may already have some project you post on GitHub you can make a blog post about. You can also write about some experience you had at data science conference or local meetup. Finally share your blog as this can help with networking. Yes, this is a true statement. For example, when I first started to blog, I blogged about installing Anaconda in our studio, as well as getting started AWS. These are very basic topics, but one thing I didn't realize is that software engineers and data scientists often Google their issues. If these same people have had their problem solved by reading a blog, they might think better the person who wrote it. In fact, over time I've had data scientists reach out to me for jobs and networking opportunities. To get started with sharing your blog, you can use Twitter, Reddit, Cora, or even republish individual blog posts across many sites. Now I encourage you to start writing. The hardest step is the first step, which is starting. Each blog post doesn't need to be perfect, you can always improve them as you go along your data science journey.