Do you consider yourself to be a PYTHON Whiz?
Is strategizing and writing codes under time pressure your forte?
Then you need to hear what Mohanaraj Jagadesan– GCDAI, October 2019 cohort– who is a Technology Evangelist and SME at SpringPeople and also Accredian’s First Python Challenge Champion– who beat over 1500 participants for this title, has to say about all this and more…
THE BASICS
Q. What is your background prior to entering this challenge?
I’m an experienced Lead Instructor with a demonstrated history of working in the Professional Training & Coaching industry. I’m skilled in Python, Oracle Database, Perl, Shell Scripting, and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) with a Bachelor’s Degree focused in Information Technology from Kumaraguru College of Technology, Coimbatore.
Q. What made you decide to enter this competition?
After receiving the email from Accredian, I realised that this is a great opportunity to try, practice, and test versatile data science, engineering and my existing skill sets.
Q. Do you have any domain knowledge that helped you succeed in this competition?
This competition required a good level of understanding of Python and since I come from a programming background, the basic knowledge at least helped me to break down the tricky problems into fewer complex scenarios.
THE VISION
Q. What inspired you to join Accredian?
Programming and coding have always been my PASSION and my vision is to become a successful Data-leader and to pursue Artificial Intelligence as my next forte.
Q. How has the road to Data Science been so far?
It has been interesting and exciting so far and I feel that in order to become a successful Python developer, you should have a good hold on core python concepts which includes a good grasp of the web framework, ORM, Analysis and Visualisation of data, use of Python packages like NumPy, Panda, etc.
LET’S GET TECHNICAL
Q. Which tools did you use to help you with the challenge questions?
I used general libraries like Python and Numpty which helped me crack the questions.
Q. How did you approach the questions and structure your solution?
Since there were multiple-choice questions, the answers looked quite similar to each other. One really had to apply their mind to the questions, especially the tricky ones to get the correct answers. Also, they needed to be timed properly as there was a time constraint.
Q. How did you spend your time preparing for this competition?
I went through the Python and Statistics starter kits provided by Accredian and brushed up all my notes I had prepared during my LIVE sessions. Watching related videos from Youtube helped as well. I focussed on revising my Python concepts.
WORDS OF WISDOM
Q. Do you have any advice for your peers in the upcoming challenges?
Attempt every quiz with confidence. Always try to break the data science problem into smaller chunks and try to solve it in an iterative process. Practice as much as you can before facing a challenge or a competition. The most important data science skills are applied and practical data science skills. Last but not the least, have patience, the solutions will come to you if dealt with them patiently.
JUST FOR FUN
Q. Secretly tell us who is your favourite faculty at Accredian?
Undoubtedly, it’s Suchit Majumdar. He is “The Man”.
Mohanaraj Jagadesan is a Lead Instructor with a demonstrated history of working in the Professional Training & Coaching industry. He completed his Bachelor’s Degree focused on Information Technology from Kumaraguru College of Technology, Coimbatore. He is the Python Challenge- Champion with the highest rank and his areas of interests include end to end data science and analytics-based architectures, language processing, deep learning, statistical machine learning, visual storytelling, and model explainability.
