Free.99

New things I learned this week:

• How to write in Markdown

• There are a LOT of people out there who are interested in/trying to break into data analytics by teaching themselves

Over the last month and a half, I have come across not only a large volume of information, but also a whole lot of free stuff. Coming from a health profession, where you need a degree and license to enter the field, seeing all of this free learning materials has been very surprising to me. I love that the barrier to entry in the tech space seems to be much lower, as long as you are willing to put some hard work and research in.

I have been collecting all of the free resources I stumbled across. As I did this I have been thinking "man, this would be cool to share with everyone...". It was not until this past week that I had the time to sit down and go "ok, how can I organize and share this information?". After all of the information had been organized nicely into Google Drive folders, I thought "what is the best way to share this with people?". A lot of other Tik Tokkers release things like this behind a paywall, or at least a "sign up for my ......". I have promised myself to never do that. So, I decided I would use a platform that is very common in the tech space already- GitHub!

This meant that I had to hone in on my skills in writing in Markdown. I had barely any experience in writing in Markdown, but I wanted to make a beautiful looking readme file. I also was glad to have already made a website, since I could not easily host the additional files I found on GitHub. I set to work and after a few nights of hyper focus and careful review, I had created one massive file, and a webpage with links to download a whole bunch of other files. I was just waiting to do some proof reading and cleaning of the document, and I decided to make a video about it on my page, just saying what was coming. Instantly, the video blew up. People were asking for the link again and again.

That lit a fire under my butt! I hastily got everything completed, cleaned up, and reached out to a smaller community of people to ask for some help proofreading. My friend Asa reviewed my work, and found quite a few typos! Autocorrect does not work in markdown files. My brain was working so fast that my fingers were not keeping up, and so it came out as a lot of little spelling errors. Impressively, all of my "coding" type things all came out exactly as I had planned them to. By the end of that first day of posting my video, it had gotten 50,000 views. That is no joke! At this point it is over 100k views.

The next morning I made a new video announcing my file, and linked to it in my website, GitHub, and LinkedIn. The response I have gotten has been overwhelmingly positive, so many people have reached out to me to thank me for creating this. It seems to me that there are a LOT of people out there who would like to get into data analytics, but have no idea where to start!

As I go along, I intend to keep adding to this file. I love that I have created a space where I can make a video saying "hey!!! YOU want to teach yourself to break into a new career without breaking the bank? Me too!! Here is this free resource I made!!!" and it will instantly be seen by thousands upon thousands of people. I have never had this access before, although I have been doing things like this my entire academic career- especially since returning for my graduate degree. I am so glad I did this.

You can get access to this file by going to my "Beginner Guide" tab of my website.