business

The passage of time makes wizards of us all. Today, any dullard can make bells ring across the ocean by tapping out phone numbers, cause inanimate toys to march by barking an order, or activate remote devices by touching a wireless screen. Thomas Edison couldn’t have managed any of this at his peak—and shortly before his time, such powers would have been considered the unique realm of God. Rob Reid After On Being a data scientist can sometimes feel like a race against software innovations....

I got my first data science job in 2012, the year Harvard Business Review announced data scientist to be the sexiest job of the 21st century. Two years later, I published a post on my then-favourite definition of data science, as the intersection between software engineering and statistics. Unfortunately, that definition became somewhat irrelevant as more and more people jumped on the data science bandwagon – possibly to the point of making data scientist useless as a job title....

Suppose you work for a business that has paying customers. You want to know how much money your customers are likely to spend to inform decisions on customer acquisition and retention budgets. You’ve done a bit of research, and discovered that the figure you want to calculate is commonly called the customer lifetime value. You google the term, and end up on a page with ten results (and probably some ads)....

You’re a hotshot manager. You love your dashboards and you keep your finger on the beating pulse of the business. You take pride in using data to drive your decisions rather than shooting from the hip like one of those old-school 1950s bosses. This is the 21st century, and data is king. You even hired a sexy statistician or data scientist, though you don’t really understand what they do. Never mind, you can proudly tell all your friends that you are leading a modern data-driven team....

Data science can be defined as either the intersection or union of software engineering and statistics. In recent years, the field seems to be gravitating towards the broader unifying definition, where everyone who touches data in some way can call themselves a data scientist. Hence, while many people whose job title is Data Scientist do very useful work, the title itself has become fairly useless as an indication of what the title holder actually does....

The hype around big data has caused many organisations to hire data scientists without giving much thought to what these data scientists are going to do and whether they’re actually needed. This is a source of frustration for all parties involved. This post discusses some questions you should ask yourself before deciding to hire your first data scientist. Q1: Do you know what data scientists do? Somewhat surprisingly, there are quite a few companies that hire data scientists without having a clear idea of what data scientists actually do....

Almost a year ago, I left my last full-time job and decided to set on an independent path that includes data science consulting and work on my own projects. The ultimate goal is not to have to sell my time for money by generating enough passive income to live comfortably. My five main areas of focus are – in no particular order – personal branding & networking, data science contracting, Bandcamp Recommender, Price Dingo, and marine conservation....

This is the fifth part of a series of posts on my Bandcamp recommendations (BCRecommender) project. Check out previous posts on the general motivation behind this project, the system’s architecture, the recommendation algorithms, and initial traction planning. In a previous post, I discussed my plans to apply the Bullseye framework from the Traction Book to BCRecommender, my Bandcamp recommendations project. In that post, I reviewed the 19 traction channels described in the book, and decided to focus on the three most promising ones: blogger outreach, search engine optimisation (SEO), and content marketing....

This is the fourth part of a series of posts on my Bandcamp recommendations (BCRecommender) project. Check out previous posts on the general motivation behind this project, the system's architecture, and the recommendation algorithms. Having used BCRecommender to find music I like, I’m certain that other Bandcamp fans would like it too. It could probably be extended to attract a wider audience of music lovers, but for now, just getting feedback from Bandcamp fans would be enough....

One of my favourite blog posts in recent times is The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data’s unifying abstraction by Jay Kreps. That post comprehensively describes how abstracting all the data produced by LinkedIn’s various components into a single log pipeline greatly simplified their architecture and enabled advanced data-driven applications. Among the various technical details there are some beautifully-articulated business insights. My favourite one defines data’s hierarchy of needs:...