Every role in a business is a problem solver, yet surprisingly, we are taught very little about good approaches to solving problems. — On October 22, 1707, over 1,400 British sailors died off the coast of Sicily. When the British Government investigated the disaster, findings revealed that a series of navigation errors resulted in the ships running aground. At the time, the only way to determine a ship’s distance from shore (i.e. …

It’s time for Business Intelligence to evolve. — For 8 out of 10 of you reading this sentence, analytics is a failure. Yes, you’ve created dashboards and reports. The teams you support have KPIs and indicators about their business. They can watch numbers going up and down. But ask yourself this question: What legitimate changes in behavior have…

As new tools and technologies make technical data tasks trivial, the demand for data “soft” skills will sky-rocket. — It happened about two years ago. I was tasked to build a pipeline to pull marketing data from the Amazon Marketing Services API into our database. I cracked my knuckles, opened up a text editor, and started framing out the code to build a data integration using Python. I got…

Practical suggestions that will help you start an analytics career — One of my most popular Medium articles is about how to get into data and analytics without a STEM degree. …

These are the Python code snippets I re-use the most — Even the most experienced coders google stuff. I re-google simple lines of code that I use all the time just as a quick reminder of syntax. In that sense, I’m really writing this article for myself. …

Use these simple techniques to make your analysis and data extracts easier — Over an eight-year data career, I’ve relied on a few simple, yet lesser-known SQL techniques to save myself countless hours performing analysis and building ETL pipelines. In this article, I’ll share six that come up over and over again: Finding and deleting duplicate records from a table with x as (select *, row_number() over(partition by [key],[key],[key] order by…

As a Data generalist, I worked on a lot of weird, surprising projects in 2021 — Whether you’re a Data Scientist, BI developer, or Data Engineer, your purpose is to extract value from data. In 2021, I stepped outside the traditional box that defines a data and analytics job. Rather than worry about the type of work I was doing, I focused solely on providing value…

Analytics is more about decision-making than data. — A few years go I did an analytics consulting project for a marketing team at a large technology company. My team and I did a data integration that stitched their marketing platform data with Salesforce. …