Life is going great! I’m getting married in nine days, I’ll be starting a new career in three weeks, I’m planning my next coding project, and studying hard to keep some of the skills I learned in the Data Analytics boot camp I completed a couple months ago. I have a lot of big changes coming up, and I know I will accomplish a lot of great things as a husband, Product Analyst, and data science enthusiast.
I’m proud of the wine recommendation app I was able to put together and host at robotsdodream.com, but I need to make a few improvements to enhance the user experience. I am working on redesigning the site so it returns the results on the same page, instead of redirecting the user away from the search tool. I’ll also be embedding links within the results so you can shop for the recommendations on wine.com.
The last feature I have planned for the coming months is a “Random” button. Not just any-old random button, though… I want to engineer a feature that could generate a random search query to produce the recommendations. Not only could I practice some NLP data manipulation techniques, but also I’d be able to provide some insight into wine descriptions. For example, I am not a wine connoisseur and don’t know a whole lot about ways in which people describe wine. These are some of my typical queries:
- red and easy to drink
- sweet and fruity
- buttery rich chardonnay
- full bodied and flavorful
As you can see, I don’t have an exhaustive vocabulary when it comes to wine. Using data science to better understand some of the key words used in the descriptions will hopefully help me produce better recommendations.
While I’m working on those features, I’ve started planning my next project. My soon-to-be wife and I have been talking about getting into some board games. As a life long gamer, I think analyzing some of the top board games on boardgamegeeks.com would be a fun way to decide which game we try next. I created a plan for the dataset and started working on a python script to scrape some data. I’ll write up a tutorial on what I did once I’m done with the data engineering phase.
Other than the coding projects, my wedding is right around the corner and I landed a new job that allows me to apply the experience I’ve gained over the last 8 years in new and exciting ways. Life is busy, but I am enjoying my upward spiral and can’t wait to see what challenges I’ll overcome next.
Eric Kleppen Wins 