The point of creating this website, and subsequent posts, is to provide motivation to enhance my programming knowledge and channel that towards exploring Earth Science data and beyond. I became interested in programming while working on my master’s thesis at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The journey began with a course in MATLAB, which we used to explore an array of topics with respect to Earth Science applications. From there, I applied that knowledge to manipulate climate datasets I used for my research. Typically, this meant working with netCDF files and/or large csv files. I quickly learned that I needed to interface with a programming language in order to work with netCDF files in any meaningful way. MATLAB was my gateway program, as it were, but I eventually had to decide on the program/programming language I wanted to use for my research and figures that I would have in my thesis. After poking around online and asking about other peoples’ experience, I eventually settled on Python. At the time I was asking around in 2017-ish, a lot of people suggested both R and Python. Yes, the good ole Python vs. R debate! Long story short, I ended up selecting Python because the applications with Python seemed so vast and honestly I just needed to choose a programming language. So, I ended up spending the summer learning basics (syntax, flow control, data cleaning techniques, etc.).
I still consider myself a novice programmer overall, but after I saw what Python, and other programming languages are capable of, I was hooked. So here I am, in 2021, still learning best coding practices, learning new packages, and trying to apply my coding knowledge at work and in personal projects. And yes, to this day this involves a ton of googling, reading different sources, and even simply looking for inspiration and insight from other people’s blogs, videos and vizualizations. My goal is to use this site as an excuse to get hands-on experience with projects involving Earth Sciences and continue improving my code based (including feedback from the community). I hope to motivate other folks with limited experience to try it out for themselves and see what they are capable of learning and creating in the process!