What REALLY is Data Science? Told by a Data Scientist

Data science is not about making complicated models. It's not about making awesome visualizations and it's not about writing code. Data science is about using data to create as much impact as possible for your company. Now impact can be in the form of multiple things. It could be in the form of insights, in the form of data products or in the form of product recommendations for your company. Now to do those things then you need tools like making complicated models or data visualizations or writing code. But essentially as a data scientist your job is to solve real company problems using data and what kind of tools you use. We don't care. Now there's a lot of misconception about data science especially on YouTube. And I think the reason for this is because there's a huge misalignment between what's popular to talk about and what's needed in the industry. So because of that, I want to make things clear. I am a data scientist working for a gaffa company and those companies really emphasize on using data to improve their products. So this is my take on what is data science. Before data science, we popularized the term data mining in an article called from data mining to knowledge discovery in databases in 1996 in which it referred to the overall process of discovering useful information from data. In 2001, William S. Cleveland wanted to bring data mining to another level. He did that by combining computer science with data mining. Basically, he made statistics a lot more technical which he believed will expand the possibilities of data mining and produce a powerful force for innovation. Now you can take advantage of compute power for statistics and he called this combo data science. Around this time, this is also when web 2.0 0 emerged where websites are no longer just a digital pamphlet but a medium for a shared experience amongst millions and millions of users. These are websites like MySpace in 2003, Facebook in 2004 and YouTube in 2005. We can now interact with these websites, meaning we can contribute, post, comment, like, upload, share, leaving our footprint in the digital landscape we call internet and help create and shape the ecosystem we now know and love today. And guess what?