And we're back to folding data in 2022! I hope everyone had a great holiday time and start to the new year.

An Interesting Read: Understanding Isn't Enough

No doubt Data Observability is the "Big Data" of 2021 as far as hype cycles go. With new vendors popping up every couple of weeks, we start questioning how many different tools we need, what to expect of them, and what's the limit of observability?

In her post, Sarah Krasnik points out an important gap: simply knowing something is off is not enough (and sometimes even detrimental given the information overload and noisy data). Sarah suggests that we should be estimating the value of these data observability products in terms of productivity (time saved) rather than just "observability".

From knowledge to action

Tool of the Week: Mito

We people with "Data" in our titles often look down on Excel-lovers who fanatically use it to get around their analytical needs. Seriously, where's version control, DAGs, JOINs at the very least? But numbers don't lie. Nor does Mode co-founder Benn Stancil who dreams about "Excel for everything" as the ultimate solution for BI.

And you know what's better than Excel? Excel inside a Jupyter notebook!

Embrace spreadsheets inside Jupyter

Laws, Heuristics and Their Limits

We kind of agreed that borrowing ideas from software engineering into the world of data is not a bad idea. So perhaps great minds of software can teach us a thing or two?

Hacker Laws – a neat collection of laws and heuristics from some of the best thinkers in software engineering and beyond. But be mindful that heuristics work only most of the time by design 😉

Show me hacker laws

What I am proud of

Isn't this the best compliment you can get as a data tool developer? Automating something is easy. Making a Data Engineer "do the right thing" and being happy about it – that's something!

Before You Go

If that's your Friday morning... ping me!

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