This chapter covers
- Growing your portfolio of projects and blog posts
- Finding and getting the most out of conferences
- Giving a great data science talk at a meetup or conference
- Contributing to open source
When you’re in a data science job, doing well at it can feel like the only way to advance your career. But there are many other ways to grow your skills, especially by engaging with the data science community. Spending time outside work doing activities such as presenting talks or contributing to open source can be enormously beneficial for your career.
In this chapter, we go over four ways you can join the community: growing your portfolio, attending conferences, giving talks, and contributing to open source. We present four activities so that you may choose the ones you like best; very few people have the time and energy to do them all. Although these things will take time outside your normal day job, that doesn’t mean they should take over your life. Throughout this chapter, we give advice about using your time effectively with tactics such as reusing talks, turning a blog post into a talk, and writing a blog post about your first open source contribution.