My recent experiences using Azure ML

I never thought I'd write "Microsoft" and "exciting" in the same sentence. I started my data career using Excel, which is a great tool for prototyping and sharing data quickly, and has been used by many people as a gateway to learning programming through VBA, but has none of the features someone serious about working with data could get behind: version control, testing, code review,cross-platform compatibility, or more than 1 million rows. Oh, also it crashes all the time. Then there all of the wrong Microsoft has made on the developer side, from making C# proprietary, to forcing IE 6 compatibility, to the awfulness that is the Windows command prompt. Needless to say, as soon as I learned enough to know better, I switched to Mac and never looked back.