Earnest Engineer

As I am pretty sure was said, loudly and repeatedly in the movie Jerry Maguire: “Show Me The Data!” It is the Data Scientists Mantra... Data is in our name and really you need data to do your work, and we often have a singular place to store and find all our data (a data warehouse) for the work we do. But of course, the better the tools you have to easily group it, subset it, order it and otherwise transform it, the more insights you can reveal with the rest of your skills. To command all the power that the data warehouse offers and that your analytical work deserves, having a solid grip on SQL (Structured Query Language) is key. It will make your life easier, happier, and simply more wonderful. So, here are some tools to aid in that quest. Books First of all, I would like to introduce you to O’Reilly books, mostly because of 2 titles I have found repeatedly useful: SQL Pocket Guide – A Guide to SQL Usage, this slim volume helps with the details of syntax and all...

Often being in a box is a matter of point of view. Oftentimes when I'm trying to think of ideas and solutions, and I feel stuck, I remember ask myself the "who, what, where, why, when, and how" types of questions . But when I don't remember that tool for thought, I'm  lucky enough to be working with a group of people who regularly show me other ways to think "out-of-the-box" as it were. Today I was asked a question that I tried to answer for a co-worker. They were using R studio and editing an HTML table, and they needed to get some space between some columns. It was a technical issue, and my first idea, adding a non-breaking space to a collapsed column in-between the columns, didn't work. I didn't understand why it didn't work, because in other circumstances it would have worked fine. In fact, the behavior I got seemed entirely wrong and I didn't know why. I knew at worst my solution should have no effect, but that fact that it simp...