Case study engaged.

I am currently suffering from brain drain and a couple long nights thanks to the capstone project. I understand programming as I have done it once or twice, lol. Unfortunately, anytime I learn a new language it feels a little like banging my head against a wall. That isn’t saying that I hate it. It can be frustrating but rewarding. Learning R is no different. Once I started understanding how the language worked I started getting into it. .

Even with that I found myself more than once having to step back and troubleshoot issues with my project. I decided that because I enjoy punishing myself I would use GitHub for version control so I would reliably have a back up if I broke something which I did multiple times while learning the program. Dissecting and analyzing my data didn’t appear to be complicated at first glance. How hard could it be to determine the best genre to make a game in?

Turns out it was really clear as action is the biggest genre. Looking into the data though I noticed a few things. The way they had divided the genres didn’t fit my expectations, instead I found that another column held the data that would lead to deeper investigation. I began by cleaning my data removing nulls and rows that were not relevant to my analysis. I did this by creating new data frames to save my work through the process for review by my peers later. I probably redid the project over 10 times until I finally got the data to tell the story in a clear way. I decided that I had reached a decent stopping point for the night and enjoyed a movie. “Guardians of the Galaxy 3.” I will post a review later, but the short version is I enjoyed it.

The next day I decided to start back working and then disaster struck in two ways. The first was that building graphics was a new concept to me and that took some time to learn. Finally after hours of struggling I had my graph the way I wanted. Now I just needed to label and finish the information provided so I took a break. I returned to a code apocalypse. Almost all of my code had vanished due to a pc issue needing reboot…

I won’t lie and say it didn’t hurt. The day before the project deadline my code was obliterated. While I had been documenting a lot of my code separately and that had survived, I lost a lot of the hard work I had put forth on the analysis and visualization. I was left with a choice of either digging in and committing to getting it done or take a break and walk away for a bit. I am not one to give up so easily though, so I put my head down and started working. My frustration level had reached a new high, but I couldn’t stop I was slowly clawing back to where I was before the crash. I stayed up and powered through the night and I was lost in the work when I heard my phones alarm going off telling me it was time to start my day. I kept working though because I had made it back to my visualization work.

I didn’t slow up. I was building bar graphs that were hideous and not conveying anything that I liked. I decided that I needed to clean up the junk that was useless when I found that I had already created the information that I wanted. It wasn’t themed or cohesive but looking at the visuals I created I realized that all of my visuals had been built but they weren’t perfect. I still had enough information to present so I decided that even though I wasn’t super satisfied with it I had plenty to work with and more to work on going forward. Once I did that I made a plan to publish my work up to the point and continue to work on it to improve the deliverables. That is where we are at today and you can view the currently published Case Study in my portfolio HERE.