Data

This week's episodes is for data scientists, sure, but also for data science managers and executives at companies with data science teams. These folks all think very differently about the same question: what should a data science team be working on? And how should that decision be made? That's the subject of a talk that I (Katie) gave at Strata Data in early March, about how my co-department head and I select projects for our team to work on.

We have several goals in data science project selection at Civis Analytics (where I work), which can be summarized under "balance the best attributes of bottom-up and top-down decision-making." We achieve this balance, or at least get pretty close, using a process we've come to call the Idea Factory (after a great book about Bell Labs). This talk is about that process, how it works in the real world of a data science company and how we see it working in the data science programs of other companies.

Relevant links: https://conferences.oreilly.com/strata/strata-ca/public/schedule/detail/63905

How to pick projects for a professional data science team

Decentralised Data Infrastructure for Science:

James Littlejohn, Living Knowledge Network -- "Building on DaMaHub to create a Living Knowledge Network", British Library, 21 April 2018

slides: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QQR2f_pFnHSdpdRa5Tg2W8WoRsTl-51i

TASCAM DR-40

James Littlejohn "Building on DaMaHub to create a Living Knowledge Network"

If you're a data scientist at a firm that does a lot of software building, chances are good that you've seen or heard engineers sometimes talking about "agile software development." If you don't work at a software firm, agile practices might be newer to you. In either case, we wanted to go through a great series of blog posts about some of the practices from agile that are relevant for how data scientists work, in hopes of inspiring some transfer learning from software development to data science.

Relevant links:
https://www.locallyoptimistic.com/post/agile-analytics-p1/
https://www.locallyoptimistic.com/post/agile-analytics-p2/
https://www.locallyoptimistic.com/post/agile-analytics-p3/

Agile Development for Data Scientists, Part 1: The Good

There's just too much interesting stuff at the intersection of agile software development and data science for us to be able to cover it all in one episode, so this week we're picking up where we left off last time. We'll give a quick overview of agile for those who missed last week or still have some questions, and then cover some of the aspects of agile that don't work well out-of-the-box when applied to data analytics. Fortunately, though, there are some straightforward modifications to agile that make it work really nicely for data analytics!

Relevant links:
https://www.agilealliance.org/agile101/12-principles-behind-the-agile-manifesto/
https://www.locallyoptimistic.com/post/agile-analytics-p1/
https://www.locallyoptimistic.com/post/agile-analytics-p2/
https://www.locallyoptimistic.com/post/agile-analytics-p3/

Agile Development for Data Scientists, Part 2: Where Modifications Help

If you've been in data science for more than a year or two, chances are you've noticed changes in the field as it's grown and matured. And if you're newer to the field, you may feel like there's a disconnect between lots of different stories about what data scientists should know, or do, or expect from their job. This week, we cover two thought pieces, one that arose from interviews with 35(!) data scientists speaking about what their jobs actually are (and aren't), and one from the head of data science at AirBnb organizing core data science work into three main specialties.

Relevant links:
https://hbr.org/2018/08/what-data-scientists-really-do-according-to-35-data-scientists
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/one-data-science-job-doesnt-fit-all-elena-grewal

James Littlejohn "Building on DaMaHub to create a Living Knowledge Network"

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