This episode is a re-broadcast of a podcast I did with Bassem Dghaidi, a senior software engineer at GitHub. Bassem has a podcast and YouTube channel called Glich. On his show, he covers moderate to advanced engineering topics on coding, architecture and management. Data analytics is a little outside of the topics he generally talks about, but there are many crossovers between data analytics and engineering as you have probably heard on Dear Analyst. We cover a lot of basic concepts...

Matthew Brandt didn't know analytics was a potential career option until he started managing websites with Google Analytics. Matthew is Canadian, spent most of his life in Switzerland, and went to high school in Japan. He attended the EHL hospitality school at Lausanne, and was part of the 70% who left the hospitality field after graduation to start his career in analytics. From data engineering to data architecture to reverse ETL, Matthew has done and seen it all. To merge his love for...

Gift Ojeabulu is a data science professional, community organizer, and data practitioner from Nigeria. He studied biochemistry at university but eventually switched to computer science. He first started in web and Android development before moving to the data science field. By attending developers conferences in Lagos, he started learning more about data science and started building his own data science communities in 2019. He learned a lot of his skills through Udacity and even won a data...

Once you learn the VLOOKUP formula, your world opens up in terms of being able to analyze and manipulate data. There are hundreds if not thousands of tutorials on how to use the VLOOKUP formula since it's such a powerful formula for finding the data you need in a long list. Comparable formulas include the combination of INDEX and MATCH and the new XLOOKUP formula which took the Excel world by storm. One common task you might need to do as an analyst is find data based on multiple conditions...

I'm always fascinated by how different people on the podcast find their way into data, and this episode is no exception. Austin Dowd has always enjoyed photography. He was associated with the American Marketing Association and was always curious in the metrics for his photos. After pestering the analytics person in the AMA in terms of how to analyze his photo metrics, he eventually decided to do a career change into analytics and received a Nanodegree in data analytics through Udemy. This...

I used to create a monthly 30-slide report and each slide had a different table or chart that I copied and pasted from Excel. As a naive analyst, I literally filtered my list of data using regular dropdown filters on each column to get the numbers I needed. I would filter, sum or average the data, and then enter the data onto the slide. It was super manual work. One benefit was I got really good at using keyboard shortcuts to filter a list of data. I didn't realize that a PivotTable could...

Experimentation is a valuable activity in a variety of functions. A product team should be constantly experimenting with features to see which variant leads to the most engagement, sales, or some target metric. But what about on a data analytics team? Mel Restori is the former Director of Analytics & Analytics Engineering at Trove, a resale platform for some of the world’s top brands. Mel’s career has always been in tech, but she started as an industrial engineer. She discusses her path...

Outside of Excel, you've seen and heard multiple data platforms on this newsletter and podcast. Everything from commercial data platforms to open-source platforms driven by communities. In this episode, you'll hear the other side of the data platform ecosystem. David Yakobovitch is a general partner at DataPower Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in early stage data science, applied AI, and machine learning startups. I don't normally hear or read about the investor's perspective in...

Holy cannoli. Somehow we've hit 100 hundred episodes of the Dear Analyst podcast. This podcast started off as an experiment because I was lazy and got tired of writing. I figured speaking about Excel and data analytics would be easier than coming up with prose. Ironically, I'm still writing because all the show notes for each episode are summarized through this blog and in the LinkedIn newsletter. Source: scaffmag I started publishing episodes more regularly during the pandemic...

MLOps, neuromorphic computing, next-generation enterprises. These are concepts you generally don't hear about in the field of data analytics. This episode shows that you can parlay a career in data analysis into any field you want. That's exactly what Ryan Cunningham did to become a Senior Associate Builder at AI Fund. Ryan studied finance and computer science at Georgetown, and honed his modeling skills at Credit Suisse after graduation focusing on the oil and gas sector. At Uber, Ryan...

When you're working in a marketing or advertising agency, you'll work with clients across various industries. The data you analyze will also vary client to client, giving you exposure to various datasets and the business logic that drives these datasets. Wacarra Yeomans started her career as a graphic designer in the agency world. She always had a knack for building empathy for the end consumer. This empathy would drive how she approached her designs. People assumed Wacarra didn't "know" data...

As a flex player on a data team, you might play the role of a data scientist, data analyst, or data engineer. Sarah Krasnik is one of those people who has held all these roles. In this conversation, Sarah gets into the weeds of what most data analysts do: helping business partners make better decisions with data. Prior to her current role as an independent consultant, she worked on different data challenges faced by operations, marketing, and customer support functions. Eventually, she...

What did the developer say to the DBA? It doesn't matter, the answer is "no." I've never worked with a database administrator (DBA) before but know they play an important part in the data lifecycle at a company. Sean Scott stumbled into the DBA world and has been in this field for 25+ years. He started his career working at a consumer electronics manufacturer. He started building his data chops as an inventory analyst and eventually got into the world of Oracle database migrations and...

The motivation for this post/episode is a selfish one (scroll to the very bottom or skip to the end of the podcast to see why). As I thought about the framing of this post during my normal "thinking" moments (commuting, on the toilet, during useless meetings), I realized I'm going to take a different approach to why people should and shouldn't use Google Sheets. I'm not going to list all the features and do a pros/cons list. This episode is more about how software (in this case Google Sheets)...

A common theme I've noticed from talking with many data analysts and data engineers is that they didn't come from a "data" background. Helen Mary Barrameda someone who exemplifies this theme. She is based in the Philippines and started her career as a freelance writer in 2004 writing lifestyle pieces. She used her earnings from her writing gigs to pay for her engineering education, and eventually became a geodata engineer working in the field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In this...

This episode is quite different from other episodes for a few reasons. One, it's the first time I've had two guests on the show at the same time. Second, it's the first time I've had educators on the show. Third, the guests have a podcast about Python so they taught me a thing or two about interviewing guests on a show :). Kelly Schuster-Paredes starting teaching Python in middle school about four years ago. Sean Tibor also taught Python in middle school but transitioned to a cloud...

Data can come from different places, and one area I don't hear about too often is from vehicles. Victor Rodrigues is from Brazil and transitioned into a career in data six years ago. Before that, he was working in various IT including network and infrastructure administration. He eventually relocated to Dublin working as a cloud specialist for Microsoft helping organizations with digital transformation. We discuss a specific data project involving vehicle telemetry data, when data and the...

I first heard Elena speak on another podcast and was shocked to hear an analyst talk about one of the biggest companies to emerge during the pandemic: Peloton. Someone from the inside, as it were, is talking about topics that Peloton would likely want to keep confidential. Due to PR and the restrictions that come with an NDA, Elena couldn't come on the podcast to talk about the data projects she was working last year. A few months ago, Elena became a principal data scientist at Superhuman,...

You go to a family gathering and everyone is fawning over you cousin who has a cushy stats job at Harvard. Knowing your cousin, you think to yourself: if my cousin can do it, so can I. Next thing you know, you are a research fellow at Harvard University. Tyler Vu was studying applied math at Cal State Fullerton and didn't realize he had a passion for Biostatistics until his fellowship at Harvard. He is currently getting his PhD in Biostatistics at UCSD and is the youngest person to ever...

Most episodes I have the privilege of speaking with analysts who are in the trenches using tools and doing analyses. In this episode, we look at the role of data from a manager/director of data's perspective. David Jayatillake is currently the Chief Product & Strategy Officer at Avora, an augmented analytics solution that helps companies make better decision. Not to say David doesn't get into the weeds when he has to (his GitHub profile tells that story), but it was interesting hearing...

Companies are generating more big data these days, so dumping the data into a CSV for analysis just doesn't cut it anymore. Sure you could use Power Query or Power BI, but more analysts are turning to Python and platforms built for big data processing. The next step is to use machine learning to help predict what the future might look like. Santiago Viquez is currently a data analytics mentor at Springboard, an education platform helping students prepare for new careers. On the side, Santiago...

Everyone is probably familiar with the 600,000 emails released by Enron after their scandal right at the turn of the century. A lot of different analyses was done on those emails, but there's one interesting analysis that I didn't see until recently: the emails with spreadsheets as attachments. Felienne Hermans, a computer scientist at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, scoured all the emails that had Excel spreadsheets attached to them and analyzed 15,000 internal Enron...

Nothing like a click-baity headline to get your spreadsheet emotion all riled up amirite? Earlier in my data analysis career, I thought knowing advanced Excel formulas and writing macros made you a good analyst. If you've been following this podcast/newsletter, you've probably discovered that there is no one magic Excel feature that automatically makes you a good data analyst. The key to good data analysis is a soft skill: asking good questions (see this episode with the co-founder of Mode,...

You might think not having a data background means it'll be tougher for you to get a career in data. For Preksha Kaparwan, co-founder and CMO at Alphaa AI, the journey into data was anything but traditional. In this episode, Preksha talks about starting her career in the hospitality industry, falling in love with data through printed POS (proof-of-sale) receipts, and bombing meetings with clients when she was growing her startup. In addition to being a startup founder, Preksha was a 2021...

Unlike the NBA, you can't easily pick and choose the top "plays" of 2021 in the data analytics field like you can with basketball games. This list is by no means exhaustive and is just based on my reading of news and trends in the data analytics world. It's easy to talk about big changes to tool and platforms that occurred throughout the year, but I'll try my best to focus on actual job or organizational trends that affect the data analytics profession. The bigger swag will be my predictions...