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When Tough Gets Toxic
A recent report from Reuters about the death of a 35-year old investment banker who worked in Bank of America’s high-demand FIG team has reinvigorated debate around what it means to be a toxic work environment. While articles are quick to note that the official cause of death was an acute coronary artery thrombus (formally…
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Bayesian Analysis with Python by Osvaldo Martin
While Python is my go-to language for things like NLP, I usually use R for everything else. After spending a solid long weekend with Martin’s new book “Bayesian Analysis with Python” I can confirm that this book will be just what ONE audience needs, but may be less useful for others. Are you in the…
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Accountability: Getting Real About What We CAN Do
When you hear the word accountability, what do you think of? In cultures with low psychological safety, accountability can be a scary word. Who’s going to whip the horses harder to get them to go faster? (This is particularly frightening if you’re one of the horses.) As long as there are people assigned to the…
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“Us vs. Them”: There’s A Better Choice
Over the past 25 years (at least), I’ve routinely noticed two (and only two!) patterns of interaction emerge between people, and one of those patterns is wildly superior to the other. This post is my attempt to make you aware of them and recognize there’s a better choice than letting “us vs. them” dynamics take…
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A Solid Data Architecture Pays Off
Earlier this year, the people who (rightly) decided the “collective we” needed better tools to manage all our spaghetti SQL (dbt) acquired the “semantic layer” company, Transform. In one of the merger announcements, I read this: Imagine instead that you could disentangle metric definition from visualization. In this world, the teams that own metrics would…
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Enterprise Data and the Holy Grail
TL;DR – A core principle of systems engineering and software engineering isn’t readily applied (or even recognized!) among people who build, operate, and maintain enterprise data ecosystems… leading us to inadvertently make fragile systems more fragile, and confusing data flows even more confusing. The Holy Grail is a legendary artifact in Christian mythology. Typically imagined…
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ETL is So Much Easier Now
When I think about the rich landscape of ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) tools that organizations can choose from in 2023 to reduce the time to access and manipulate data, I feel like a fossil. Back in the 90s, we didn’t have it that easy. We had to walk to and from school every day,…
Quality and Innovation 