Exton taught business at a community college for several years, and now does community management for an event management company. He still teaches Marketing 101 every year to help people with backgrounds like his.
Exton uses Excel to keep track of who is registered for webinars, workshops, and training sessions. He doesn’t think of himself as a programmer, but spends hours creating complicated lookup tables to figure out how many webinar attendees turn into community contributors, who answers forum posts most frequently, and so on.
Exton knows there are better ways to do what he’s doing, but feels overwhelmed by the blog posts, tweets, and “helpful” recommendations from the company’s engineering team.
Exton is a single parent; the one evening a week he spends teaching is the only out-of-work time he’s able to take away from family responsibilities.
Exton wants an overview that will tell him what laptop-scale data science is all about, what tools to learn first, how they’re going to help him, and where he should look for introductory tutorials. He doesn’t care if these are the best answers so long as they are clear, concise, and consistent. He would also benefit from side-by-side comparisons of Excel and R.