Where do you start a data project? Often we want to 'get into the data'. After all, we are data people; we got into this space because we like data. That isn't what Shaun did while working for a customer last year on a project that needed him to make sense of 13...
Good luck writing software to consume this! Source: flickr/avlxyz (CC BY-SA 2.0) In a now-famous article published in 2011, Marc Andreessen argued that software is eating the world, because Amazon destroyed Borders, etc. He warned that the market was undervaluing tech...
Cool, I found that date field I was looking for on line 8! But also on line 9...damn...what now? Source: author's collection. A natural way for data people to start our projects is to "just get in to the data and see what's there." Almost every week, in fact, I tell a...
These steps look difficult too. Are we going up or down? Source: Wikipedia (CC BY 2.0) You read that right, the steps are difficult. I'm not going to lie to you! I've written before about the promise and disappointment of open data. To those of us who work with it,...
Agile is trendy! It's all the rage these days to hold a few standups, start referring to weeks as "sprints", change your mind frequently, and claim to be Agile. As we like to say around here "that's ad hoc, not Agile!" And if you search "Agile BI" you'll find...
Good luck parsing these rules into your data warehouse! Source: Wikipedia You may have noticed some posts appearing about Optimal Data Engine (ODE), our open-source and language-agnostic tool for better data warehousing. Aside from the technical breakthroughs, what...
Assuming you can find the right stone, how will you get the blood (or open data) out? Source: flickr/dj2lip (CC-BY-2.0) Why I want more open government data (we paid for it already!) As you might already know I'm a bit of a crusader for open government data. Maybe it...
Feeling out of your element, dude? Let me explain. Photo: Ginger Williams-Cook We've been blogging a lot recently about AgileBI, BEAM✲ and Modelstorming, and we use those terms somewhat interchangeably. I'll use this post to help you through the maze of terminology....
Do you care about the path if the destination is the same? Photo: Wikimedia, cc-by-sa-2.0. Earlier this month I had a good old-fashioned rant about Machine Learning (ML). I wanted to simply compare recently-released Amazon Machine Learning with already-mature Azure...
Participants at GovHack 2014 in Sydney, from the GovHack Wikipedia page. There are some pretty strong negative connotations to the word "hack". Most people envisage sweaty individuals in a room full of screens cracking in to sensitive information to bring the world to...