Always drop the first column after performing One Hot Encoding?
This question, in a slightly different form, was discussed herein earlier.
You are kind of right, but the best and safest way is to do One-Hot-Encoding and drop at the end because which column you want to drop at the very beginning?
In fact in pandas.get_dummies there is a parameter i.e. drop_first allows you whether to keep or remove the reference (whether to keep k or k-1 dummies out of k categorical levels). Please note drop_first = False meaning that the reference is not dropped and k dummies created out of k categorical levels! You set drop_first = True, then it will drop the reference column after encoding.