Read my July review here.

I had set myself two targets for the month of August - write 10 blog posts and complete the Python 3 programming specialization (offered by the University of Michigan) on Coursera.

I completed the month on a high note - I wrote 75 blog posts, all of them related to Python and pandas (a Python library for data analysis & data manipulation).

I had completed the aforementioned Python course on Coursera about a year ago. Unfortunately, I did not have a blog back then, so I could not document my learning. This time, I didn’t take the course because I didn’t want to pay for it. I decided to learn from all the free material available on the internet. Having said that, there are tons of good courses available on Coursera, especially on data science. So, I might take an annual subscription, which will be cheaper in comparison to paying for individual courses.

Learning Python, especially pandas, proved to be extremely valuable. After I added pandas to my data analysis toolkit, I have been able to drastically reduce the time I usually take cleaning and manipulating data using Excel. I wish I had started learning pandas much earlier.

Every month I end up buying one or two courses from Udemy. August was no exception. I bought a course on making Excel dashboards by Leila Gharani. I don’t think I will be able to complete the course until November as I have some other learning goals for the month of September & October.

So, all in all, I am extremely happy with the progress I made in August. More importantly, I am happy that I am able to directly apply all my learnings in my day job as a retail strategist.

What’s the plan for September?

I was thinking of dedicating the whole month to learning data visualization using Python - primarily matplotlib and seaborn. However, I changed my mind at the last minute. I have decided to focus on completing a course on Excel VBA.

I am familiar with VBA and have been writing simple VBA scripts to automate some of my daily repetitive data analysis tasks. However, I have not really taken the time to master the fundamentals in order to be able to write more complex programs with confidence. After completing the course, I should be able to automate some of the complex data analysis workflows at my day job.

I will also write 30 blog posts at the minimum, most of them related to Excel VBA programming.

That’s all from me.

What about you? What did you do in August? What are your learning goals for the coming month?

Do let me know in the comments.

I will see you folks in September. Keep safe. Adios, until then.