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@ibrahim_data
Ibrahim Musa
Data analyst transition · Excel to Python
0 followers 1 following Kano, Nigeria
Career switcher. Documenting the messy middle between spreadsheets and real datasets.
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Early-stage profiles are expected. A living Passport grows as you learn, practise and share work — starting with zero projects is a beginning, not a failure.
Posts
Window functions finally clicked
Spent the morning on ROW_NUMBER and PARTITION BY after struggling with nested subqueries for ranking. Rebuilt a sales leaderboard query in half the lines. Still slow on a big table, but the mental model is there now.
Would you actually pay to be seen first, honest answers only
Not a poll about principles, an honest question about your own wallet. If a small monthly fee genuinely put your profile in front of more recruiters and collaborators, would you actually pay it, or would you rather stay invisible for longer and let your work speak for itself over time? I go back and forth on this every time I think about it.
First week with pandas after years in Excel
I spent six years doing everything in Excel and this week I forced myself to redo one of my old reports in pandas instead. The syntax fought me at every turn, especially groupby, but by Thursday I stopped translating from Excel in my head and just wrote pandas directly. Small win, but it felt bigger than it sounds.
Would appreciate eyes on my CV before I start applying
Transitioning from four years in accounting into data analysis, and my CV currently reads like two unrelated careers stapled together. I'm not sure how much of the accounting background to keep versus how much to lead with the newer Python and SQL skills. If anyone has reviewed a career-switch CV before, I'd really value a second opinion.
My LEFT JOIN keeps returning duplicate rows
I'm joining a customers table to an orders table, and instead of one row per customer I get one row per order, which is technically correct but not what I need for this report. I want a single row per customer with a count of their orders. Do I need a subquery, or is there a simpler pattern I'm missing?
Do I need a new virtual environment for every project
I've been installing every Python package globally because I didn't understand what venv was for. Now one project needs an old pandas version and another needs the newest one, and things are breaking. Is a fresh virtual environment per project the normal way people work, or am I overcomplicating this?
What should a self-taught data person expect in a first technical interview
I have an interview coming up for a junior data analyst role and I've never done a technical interview before, only online tests. I'm comfortable with SQL and pandas basics but nervous about being asked to explain my thinking out loud. Any idea what these interviews usually look like in practice?
Why does my variable disappear outside the function
I set a variable inside a function, call the function, then try to use that same variable outside, and Python says it doesn't exist. Coming from Excel, where everything is just visible on the sheet, this scope idea is taking a while to sink in. Is there a mental model that made this obvious for you?
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Preparing first project
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