Hello HN community,
I have been working as a LAMP developer for around 8 years now and am thankful to be at the place in my career that I am. (150k at a stable company, low stress, high respect) That being said, I am drawn to data anlysis and data science in general. When I evaluate my experience, I notice that the projects that I enjoyed the most were some sort of analysis. (charts and graphs for internal performance stats, correlation of customer characteristics to product purchases, graphing a customer base to visualize relationship clusters, etc...)<p>Getting to the point, I'd really like to make the jump from LAMP developer to data analyst/scientist, but I don't really know how. I'm only getting started in performing analysis in a non-brute force way, and have only scratched the surface on things such as random forests, linear regression, and markov chains. While I am an expert in PHP, MySQL, Javascript, etc.., and am very good at working with systems (Fedora, Ubuntu, Apache, VC, CI, etc..), I am a novice in data. Ideally, I'd love to learn on the job, but am open to trading free work for instruction. Will squash bugs for data! :)<p>Has anyone here made this same type of jump? Would love to hear feedback.<p>Thanks, Sam