Towards more engaging conference talks — As I gear up for upcoming conferences and dust off some old skills, I thought I’d share some of the good habits of people whose talks I enjoy. Everyone has their own preferred styles and practices and that’s a good thing. If all speakers followed the same advice, it would…

Making sense of the Rule 4 Draft and a few other things — Following baseball more closely in the past couple of years, I found the recruiting system difficult to decipher based on tweets and hearsay. With the end of the Winter Meetings and as we wait around for the 2023 season, I decided to look into the details and share my findings…

The world is yours — Keeping the now 5-year-old tradition, I put together a list of some of my favorite songs of the year (so far). I am publishing this a bit early this year. It’s going to be a busy December and I wanted to make sure to get it done. The list is…

Categorizing design decisions in enterprise product development — It’s an interesting time to be a data practitioner. Never before has capital followed the needs of data teams so closely and intently. At the same time, the growth and evolution of the data infrastructure and tooling market has created grounds for critique, hot takes, and calls for action. As…

A list of seven habits — This post captures the essence of my experience building teams at various companies. The title and outline are from the book by Stephen Covey. Be proactive. Effective data teams are proactive about infrastructure decisions, about customer data protection, and about the design of their organization. Begin with the end in mind. Effective data teams identify, firstly, the business…

Case I. Evaluating AI platforms — I recently spoke at the apply(meetup), an event bringing together AI and data practitioners. Thanks to Kevin, Demetrios, Tecton for making this happen! Below is the transcript of my talk. Introduction Not so long ago, I met with over 20 AI and another 10 analytics…

Everlasting game — Keeping the 4-year-old tradition, I put together a list of some of my favorite songs. The list is ordered so the songs flow well. I hope you like it. The songs Everlasting Game (feat. Masta Ace & DJ Ill Dijitz) by Awon & Phoniks — Nothing Less. Quoting directly from the album description…

It doesn’t pay to swing at every pitch — Plate discipline is an interesting concept I came across recently, learning more about baseball. Scouts and managers use metrics that measure plate discipline to assess batters and pitchers. A batter with plate discipline swings at strikes and takes all else. A strike is a pitch that passes through the strike…

All at sea, exploring the data dictionary — Data toolmakers and the larger data community have long been reclaiming water terms to refer to products, services, actions, and concepts. There is a wealth of discussion about whether data is more like oil or water. Most recently data has been likened to electricity. These surface-level disagreements are water under…