6Portfolio Project FAQ
Finally getting to the point where you are ready to jump into portfolio projects is both exciting and intimidating! You may have a lot of nontechnical questions—I know I did. If I'd just had a FAQ page to help me get started, it would've saved me hours of research and uncertainty.
The tricky part of building a portfolio is that when you take courses, you just learn the skills themselves. But knowing how to write an inner join versus a left join is not very helpful until you have figured out a lot of the contextual things you need to know in order to complete portfolio projects, such as where to find usable data and whether you can use any data you find on the Internet, or if it must be limited to certain industries.
In this chapter I will answer the questions that I had, and you'll hear from career changers on social media, which will take a lot of the guesswork out of it for you.
How Do I Find Free Data?
“There is data everywhere! Just look on the Internet or use data in your own life!” I hear this a lot, both from people who are experienced data analysts or scientists and from people who had a more “traditional” education in tech. The website I hear these people direct new analysts to the most often is Kaggle.
Kaggle is a website where anyone can upload free datasets, so you can search for data in an industry that is interesting ...