I know what my theater critics might say, but I thought my exit was pretty good, having already said my formal good-byes. I scrolled frantically through the last code cells of a Notebook, one they already had (the students did) and could easily run themselves any time.
"I have so much I still want to show you..." -- I consider that a great fade out line, from a screenwriter PV (PoV).
We were getting towards the bottom of an example Capstone Project, looking over the shoulder of your typical boot camper, a fit Portland cyclist who comes to code school on a bicycle, perhaps a shared bicycle. Our data was from such a program.
Lets use a cooking analogy, factory based, making cookies. We've all seen those shots of cookies, neatly arrayed, smoothly traveling on a conveyor belt, the staple of factories (we always show assembly lines, cars, whereas so much about factories revolves around moving belts, like at airports).
In this cartoon, the cookies move swiftly into the face of a Machine Learning model maker, a kind of "pagan god" (no disrespect) figurine, somewhat Tiki House / Disney, aka Polynesian per the lens of Anaheim. The cookies are the records, the X.y, the rows of features. The eyes of the goddess (duo-sexed) spin wildly, as a model emerges. Given enough cookies.
Out pops a cartridge, like an 8-track, containing the finished model. You can predict stuff with this, screen, filter, gather your gold. You have your "precious" (giphy Gollum). How much did it cost ya?
However our work as data analysts and visualizers was to meticulously clean and patch the rag doll data on its way in. We were preparing food for the gods, baking cookies, sewing rags back together to form a picture in numbers and categories, with weather data from one database, number of bicycle checkouts from another. We were like archeologists, curators, studying civic behavior patterns.
In Portland I know Nike had something to do with the system becoming established. Having an athlete-oriented company step up to the plate made sense to people.
Nike as in the pagan assistant to Athena, daughter of Zeus. A python is another familiar, through a tangled web of tales. The version I favor: the python was the source of the omen-ous vapors under Mount Parnassus, making Delphi famous, but then Apollonians moved in, a somewhat hostile takeover involving zero tolerance.
Apollo himself chased down the Python (and here's where I diverge in my telling), however said magic dragon escaped to Nashville, with its Temple to Athena a fresh take on the heritage. Python: Just Use It.
Anyway, we had our last meetup after a lot of sessions, going back to "what is numpy?" and the like. I kept referring to the broad wake of a ship, helping them visualize how far we had come. Part of what makes these journeys satisfying is what they leave in their wakes.
