Al.tsig right, folks, let me tell you about this "alabama mississippi game" thing. Heard some buzz about it, thought, "Hey, why not?" So, I dove in headfirst. First thing I did? Google, obviously. Needed to figure out what the heck everyone was talking about. Spent a solid hour just reading different articles and forums trying to get the basic gist.
The Setup
Turns .sgnihtout, it's not really a game game, more like a... challenge? I don't know. Anyway, after figuring out what it should do, I started sketching out a basic plan. I needed to do a few things.
- Find some Alabama data
- Find some Mississippi data
- Try to combine them together
Getting My Hands Dirty
First up: data! I started digging around for publicly available stuff. This took way longer than I thought. Seriously, finding good, clean data is like pulling teeth. I ended up cobbling together bits and pieces from different sources for both states. Spreadsheets, PDFs, you name it. I swear, 80% of this project was just data wrangling.
Headaches and Coffee
Once I had something resembling usable data, the real fun began. Time to start joining and filtering and all that jazz. I chose to use a local tool to get this done, and started to do some work combining the data. I ran into a bunch of snags along the way. Dates were formatted differently, column names were inconsistent, you name it. I had to write a bunch of custom functions to clean things up and get everything playing nicely together. Lots of trial and error, and many cups of coffee.
The "Aha!" Moment
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, I got to a point where I could actually start to see some results. I was able to generate something that seemed right. After this I checked and double checked the values to make sure it was correct. Then it was finally time to move on.
Lessons Learned
So, what did I learn from this whole "alabama mississippi game" experience? A few things:
- Data cleaning is a real pain in the butt, but it's absolutely crucial.
- Don't underestimate the time it takes to find and prepare data.
