My Programming Journey
TL;DR
My name Is José Antonio, I’m a Computer Engineer specialized in Data Engineer and Data Science. In this blog I will be posting the projects I make and things I learn.
These are some of the most interesting projects I did during my student years:
During my time at TITSA (a public transport company), I learned to:
- When starting a project, don’t focus too much on the theory and start hands-on with a prototype
- If you don’t understand the requirements of a task, asking can save you hours of useless work
- How to work effectively within a team of programmers
And gained technical experience on:
- Data processing with Python, Pandas and SQL
- Creating machine learning/deep learning models (predicting passengers, cluster workshop inventory…)
- Automatization scripts with Python, like RPA’s
- Visualization with PowerBI
- Data Analysis
Introduction
Hi! As I mentioned on the homepage, my name is José Antonio. In this first blog post, I’d like to share what this blog is all about and tell you a bit about my journey into programming.
The idea behind this blog is to document topics I find interesting as I continue learning. It’s a way for me to keep track of my progress, while also sharing knowledge that might be helpful to others. In the Blog and Portfolio section you can find all my posts. If you want to see a specific type of post (review, project, blog post…) you can go to the Tags section.
How it all started & How’s it going
My first real contact with programming was in high school, when a teacher introduced us to the basics of Python. I liked it so much that I ended up creating a text-based RPG game in the terminal using what little I knew. I still remember I didn’t even know what functions were—so I just copied and pasted the enemy logic every time it was needed. Thankfully, that code is lost forever.
Right after finishing high school, I started a degree in Computer Engineering. It gave me a solid foundation, from understanding how computers work at the hardware level to topics like system administration, databases, and theoretical computer science. During that time, I worked on some interesting projects like Space Survivor, a virtual reality game, or my own C++ implementation of the k-means algorithm.
But the most exciting part came at the end. For my final project, PerseumAI, I had to learn about machine learning and neural networks from scratch. At the same time, I started an internship at the Big Data department of TITSA (Transportes Interurbanos de Tenerife), where I developed a neural network model to predict weekly passenger numbers. Thanks to both experiences, I realized that I wanted to work with data.
After finishing my degree, I was offered a 10-month contract at TITSA, where I had previously completed my internship. At the time of writing this post, I have about a month and a half left before the contract ends. Here I’ve focused mainly on data collection and processing using SQL and Python (with libraries like Pandas), building machine learning models (such as Prophet, SARIMA, k-means…), visualizing data with Power BI, and automating workflows through Python scripting.
Once the contract ends, my plan is to start a Master’s in Data Science in the upcoming academic year, which begins in September. Ideally, I’d also love to find a job related to my interests in data to keep growing professionally between the end of my contract and the start of the program.
Update after finishing my contract
See here what I learned working in the Big Data & Data Science department on TITSA