"Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves."
– Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee)
In this introductory chapter, I'll start the conversation by attempting to answer a few fundamental questions that will hopefully provide context and clarity for the rest of this book:
What is data science and why it's on the rise
Why is data science here to stay
Why do developers need to get involved in data science
Using my experience as a developer and recent data science practitioner, I'll then discuss a concrete data pipeline project that I worked on and a data science strategy that derived from this work, which is comprised of three pillars: data, services, and tools. I'll end the chapter by introducing Jupyter Notebooks which are at the center of the solution I'm proposing in this book.