While we only had one class this week to talk about, I thought the guest speakers were pretty interesting. The whole realm of open data and dealing with such large quantities of data at once is a pretty new one to me, so I feel like I learned quite a bit on what goes on in that field. It also made me realize just how many different avenues that someone could potentially go down that branch from just general “computer science” and how each one has its own topics, best practices, and useful programs to learn. I found it interesting to just kind of listen to the processes that go into setting up, acquiring, and sifting through all the different data sets out there, even if I likely won’t directly pursue the field myself.

One big, more general thing that I feel like will be really useful is their mention of awesome lists. There seems to be a crap-load of them for anything you can think of (including open data sets of course), and it seems like a great resource to look at for so many different subjects. All open source too, so it fits with the theme of the class very well!