databinoculars

[databinoculars]

Repeat Last Action

I am ashamed of this one.

Have you ever right-clicked on the left rail to insert a row? Then repeated this action 6 more times while exhaling an audible, self-calming sigh? I did too, until I met ⌘Y, who repeats your last action.

[databinoculars]

Intro

I work at Yahoo! now, implementing and analyzing anything related to data. I would be lying if I lead you to believe I have done anything aside from checking Google Analytics to make sure I'm still getting traffic to my site. So this is my experience on understanding data from scratch.

I’m calling this Data Binoculars because I am a very ‘gut instinct’ type of person. I make decisions because they feel right. Although I trust my instinct above all, there does need to be data to confirm, deny, and influence ideas (and kindly shut down the ideas of your coworkers). This is going to be very difficult for me, so I am forcing my eyes to look through a very beautiful and poetic set of data binoculars while I search for that balance.

I want to wear a hard hat and tell everyone I’m a data miner now. That sounds too cool to be right though, at least at this stage. Hadoop and I just met last week, and I am wondering how I have lived this long without using Excel. But I hope to make some interesting discoveries soon.

I probably can’t share what I find in much detail, but I do want to share what I learn in terms of tricks, tools, methods, problems, and discoveries — mostly as notes to myself, but also for anyone else going into this stuff blind.

It’ll be funny to see my progress. I just made 6 charts of basically the same thing with a lot of copy and pasting.