New Dataset: Tanzanian 2018 A-Level Exam Results
There is not much new about this blog post. I had been putting off scraping the A-Level data from the NECTA website because the data was structured in an intimidating fashion. I decided I could no longer wait after seeing this relatively shocking article on the results of the exam. So, employing the scraping tools I have talked about here to a similar problem, I can now announce that the scraper code is on GitHub! While not every available year’s data is up yet (should be coming soon, the data from 2018 is now available on GitHub too.
If you decided to read the rest of the article, I just wanted to quickly scramble some notes about my growth in the past year. Although I started this blog February 2018, I started seriously programming and formalizing my process about a year ago. It was a hot and sweaty apartment in New York and as a result, I didn’t see much sunlight. With everything that I push to GitHub, I think a lot about the kid who was excited while knowing very few tricks. I still don’t know that many tricks, but going from being intimidated by a project to taking a chance and prototyping to then publishing a solution is huge!
I am happy to have returned to coding in Python for a little bit as well. I love R and I think part of the allure for me right now is that it is so seamless to pull up the RStudio environment and quickly prototype. My GitHub now has a lot of Jupyter Notebooks because it’s just quicker to prototype on there for me. I heard of a Python IDE called Rodeo that is similar to RStudio so I might give that a try too. So far the combination of RStudio and Jupyter fits my needs.
Finally, I’m thinking about re-branding the blog. I love education, but it’s clearly not my sole interest. Ironically, this post is about education. I do want the website and my work to branch out a little bit. The title of the blog being “Elimu, Mwalimu” (trans. Education, Teacher) is also unclear/incomplete. I want to share open source information/products, but I also want to challenge myself to build data-driven enterprises.
In the coming days, I’ll be occupying myself with rebranding my portfolio; keeping the open source announcements/blogging and enterprise products duality in mind.