If you’re an older programmer, like moi’, then perhaps you haven’t had the training to appreciate Big Data. If you want to learn in a competitive environment, then it’s time to hop on over to Kaggle, a web site which poses problems thought vulnerable to Big Data techniques, supplied by organizations ranging from obscure academic groups studying oddball problems (such as determining, given unlabeled data, whether any particular record is causative or merely correlative) to medical organizations (example: given pictures of eyeballs, identify which ones may have diabetic retinopathy) to commercial organizations trying to solve a number of different problems, ranging from optimizing flight planning to selecting the proper place to locate a new restaurant – all in an environment in which teams of programmers try to best each other while a deadline looms.
I indulged in this for 3-4 months before other obligations reduced my free time to zero; add in that I didn’t have the tools others had and had to write my own, in a language (Mythryl) still in development, and had to learn stats and probability on top of that … exhilerating exhilarating actually, and good for the brain, but way too time intensive.
But if you have time, want to learn something new, and get turned on by solving really advanced crossword puzzles, hey, Kaggle’s a fun place to start.
