Kickstart Guide to Become a M-A-D Programmer

Harsha Vardhan Garlapati 22 Mar, 2021 • 6 min read
This article was published as a part of the Data Science Blogathon.

Introduction

Many technologies are emerging in our day-to-day lives, some of them are used widely and have a greater impact and the rest are used for some specific applications. Especially, the recent years of this 21st century have seen a massive revolution in technology with the evolution of the latest technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science & Deep Learning. With the help of these technologies, the working style became easier, simple, smarter, and has benefitted many people and Industries. These technologies helped in solving many complex problems, in the areas where human beings failed to find a solution to that problem.

Many industries like Healthcare, Manufacturing, Finance, Transportation, Advertising and many more use these technologies to enhance their business units and make more products to sustain in the present Market. At present, most of the industries are being automated with the evolution of these technologies and are becoming more smarter than human beings in every aspect. The Robotic industry has evolved as an application of M-A-D technologies, which resulted in doing work more accurately and efficiently than a human with better computation speed. I guess humans would be replaced by robots in many industries to get work done.

Knowing or Unknowingly, we use the applications of M-A-D in our day-to-day lives mostly in the form of Recommendations. At present and soon there is a vast scope for creating a large workspace for these M-A-D technologies and for their applications. There is no doubt that these M-A-D technologies would “Conquer” the world and would be a “Monarch” with its latest applications in any Industry. An M-A-D programmer would develop new strategies and algorithms that enhance the growth of the organization and can solve the real-world challenges faced by the people.

Wanted to be an M-A-D programmer….?? Do not know how to get started…?? Need a clear picture of M-A-D…?? Then Let’s get started. In this blog you will know the current applications, tools, programming languages, scope of research, opportunities, available workspaces, and the need to use, and the impact of M-A-D technologies in our day-to-day lives.

 

Prerequisites to M-A-D

Before getting started to be an M-A-D programmer, many people have some doubts in their mind like Do we need great coding skills…?? Do we need to have good command over data structures and Dynamic Programming….?? What programming languages are required to get started with M-A-D….?? What are the key skills to focus on to build M-A-D applications….??

The foundation of these M-A-D technologies is the “MATHEMATICS”, and one needs to get started with it, to understand the problems to find out better solutions. There are mainly 4 pillars in mathematics namely “STATISTICS, CALCULUS, LINEAR ALGEBRA, and PROBABILITY”. Many algorithms and strategies in M-A-D are implemented using these pillars, that aim to produce accurate results at the end.

At present, the most used programming languages for M-A-D applications are “PYTHON & R – language”. The reason behind using these languages especially is because it has different libraries and functions that help in developing different types of applications in M-A-D.

In the aspect of M-A-D programming, it is not that mandatory for a person to have great coding skills, but he should be capable of analyzing the given problem and find out the better logic to the problem. M-A-D is not limited to only the Coding part, apart from coding it requires analytical skills, problem understanding skills, storytelling skills, presentation skills, Visualization skills, and many more.

 

General Scenario in M-A-D

An algorithm is called a “Model” in M-A-D. The common procedure most of the programmers follow while finding a solution to a problem using these M-A-D technologies is as follows:

a) Defining the problem.

b) Collect the data.

c) Understand the data.

d) Brainstorming on the data, to know how it suits the solution development.

e) Implementing Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) technique to make the data fit the model development.

f) Split the data into 2 parts (Training & Testing).

g) Develop the Model.

h) Evaluate and Test the model with external data.

i) Obtain accurate results at the end.

j) Storytelling about data and model.

It takes less time to code for the given problem, most of the time is spent on understanding the given data, drawing insights from the data, transforming the data into a suitable format, removing null values and noise from the data, resolving the issues of outliers, etc., The solution to the problem lies in how better you understand about the given data, and the different techniques you use.

 

Websites & YouTube Channels for Learning M-A-D

These are the top websites, I have used in my journey of M-A-D, these sites have good content and plentiful information to learn and build the knowledge related to M-A-D. These are opensource and helps to lay a good foundation for our career in the latest M-A-D technologies.

Websites:

a) Analyticsvidhya

b) Machinelearningmastery

c) Analytics India Magazine

d) KDNuggets

e) Fast.ai

f) Data flair

g) Medium

h) Google’s Machine Learning

i) Towards Data Science

j) Kaggle

k) Reddit

 

YouTube Channels:

a) AndrewNg

b) CS Dojo

c) Krish Naik

d) Siraj Raval

e) Ken Jee

f) DeepLearning AI

g) Data Science Dojo

h) Data School

i) Code with Harry

Apart from these, I advise you to take courses on the leading platforms like Coursera, Udemy, Edx, etc., those certifications would add value to your skills in a particular stream. And you should try to do different projects on these technologies. Apart from the practical knowledge, you should have good knowledge in theory as well, which in turn helps a person to become a full-pledged M-A-D program and you can solve many problems easily.

 

Where do I run the M-A-D Scripts / Codes………….??

There are many tools to run the M-A-D scripts/codes, like

a) Python IDLE (Basic Start)

b) Jupyter Notebooks (Preferred)

c) Kaggle (OpenSource & Online) – Has GPU support

d) Google Colab (Opensource & Online) – Has GPU support

e) Azure Notebooks

f) Atom and many more…………!!

The above tools provide us a better user interface and programmers can connect with those environments easily and can start their work. GPU has better Computation Speed than normal CPU, we can execute our scripts very fast and get the output in a short period of time. When we run our scripts, we need to install the required libraries in our program.

Installing Libraries – “pip install library-name”.

 

Jobs For an M-A-D programmer

Once we are habituated to these M-A-D technologies, there is a wide variety of scope for a programmer to survive in the industry in the future. Some of the available job positions for an M-A-D programmer are as follows: –

A) AI Engineer

B) Machine Learning Engineer

C) Data Scientist

D) Data Analyst

E) Data Engineer

F) ML Architect

G) ML Specialist

H) Researcher

I) Applied ML Scientist and many more……………….!!

Major Companies that are hiring M-A-D programmers in the real world. some of the top companies are as follows:

We can find these jobs in many famous Job searching sites like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed Jobs, Monster, etc., and are paid higher salaries compared to the Normal Software Engineer working in a company. These latest technologies help us to get jobs at Dream Companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc., with a unique skillset and great programming skills in M-A-D.

 

Author Section

Author: – Harsha Vardhan Garlapati

I am Data Science Enthusiast and loves working with data. I am a final-year undergraduate student and passionate about Data Science. I am a smart worker, a passionate learner, an Icebreaker, and loves to participate in Hackathons to work on real-time projects. I am a Toastmaster Member at S.R.K.R Toastmasters Club, a Public Speaker, a good Innovator, and a problem solver.

LinkedIn: – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ghvardhan569/

GitHub: – https://github.com/ghvardhan569

The media shown in this article are not owned by Analytics Vidhya and is used at the Author’s discretion.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Responses From Readers

Clear

Ss
Ss 22 Mar, 2021

The point you want to convey through blog is good👏....but there are some grammatical mistakes, that you have to introspect, before publishing blog.

Shashank Dubey
Shashank Dubey 23 Mar, 2021

Hi Harsha, I wish I'd have found this blog sooner but its posted only 2 days back LOL. You have cleared many doubts with this blog and made new and better ones for the good. Been working at private for 2 years and never took any step in this direction, but will gladly do so because of you. Thanks a lot.

Anurag Singh
Anurag Singh 29 Mar, 2021

Nice descriptive article