Last month I had the opportunity to present an introduction to data science at the Women Who Code meetup in Dublin and the R/Data mini-conference, as well as an introduction to Machine Learning at the Women TechMakers event. It was great fun and such a good opportunity that I wanted to share my learnings with you.

The first stop of the month was at the Women Who Code Dublin meetup, which is a branch of Women Who Code. This is an organisation that has chapters all over the world and inspires women to excel in the technology sector. This month, the meetup for the Dublin group was held in our Zalando office in the city, with a great turnout overall (approx. 50 people). I gave an introduction into what data science is, the main problems that we tackle in our daily jobs, and the different solutions and algorithms involved. This presentation combined theory with some code examples in order to make it more interactive. There was a lot of engagement on the topic and a huge amount of questions at the end of the talk. Not only that, but I was delighted to see how people came early and stayed late to talk to each other, exchange ideas, ask more questions, and learn about Zalando… this is the real spirit of meetups such as these.

My second speaking engagement was at the R/Data mini-conference that was organised by Coding Grace, who are a group of developers based in Ireland that love to code and participate in other geeky and not-so-crafty activities. The event took place at DogPatch Labs, which is a coworking space for scaling technology startups, located in the heart of Dublin’s Digital Docklands inside the historic Chq building. The conference was a full day event where several speakers presented on different topics related to data, as well as having several workshops running in parallel. I presented my introduction to data science, and was once again thrilled to see that people were very engaged.

The third and final stop of the month was at the Women TechMakers event, which took place at Google’s offices in Dublin. In this presentation I focused on Machine Learning, explaining what it is and where it can be useful. This was the biggest and most diverse crowd of the three events, and there were also a lot of questions at the end of my presentation.

If you have any questions about data science or machine learning, please free to contact me on Twitter via @PeleteiroAna.

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