Austin Bradley

My 11-year-old sitting with her pile of Halloween candy, sorting it into a bar graph

We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.

Mulling on a thought. As a data professional, I feel it's my responsibility to make sure my business colleagues understand the processes their data goes through. I'm uncomfortable with stakeholders saying "I don't know how it works, it just does!" Not sure though if this is normal.

I just realized I'm a chronic sufferer of SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE 🐍

Apologies to all who my malady has afflicted

Amazing there's nothing like reciprocity for that

It is truly ironic, because if we really want to be able to live on other planets we have to be able to responsibly manage a biosphere. And boy are we *struggling* with the only one we have right now.

Chart showing "Correlation Between Screen Size & Your Importance in the Company" featuring a downward trend. CEOs use iPhones, while those with two monitors are labeled 'Corporate Slaves.

Inversely correlated with Al evangelism, too (at least in my experience)

AI start-up Perplexity makes $34.5bn bid for Google Chrome One technology investor called the $34.5bn offer a "stunt" that is much lower than Chrome's true value.

Unmitigated lunacy

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Oh, I did. The cuts came when I finally started to get the little hem loop and then tassels after wearing through the regular part of the pants.

Very fashion. Much cool.

Just wait till we get kids cutting off the back of their pants so it doesn't soak up water, while letting the front still cover the shoes. That was my sophomore uniform.

Nothing like a carefully laid out plan of all the things you were going to tackle before a slate of meetings that gets completely derailed by a random request that should have been quick but ended up taking you to Mordor and back.

I think all the time that this is the "science reform" we need to be having. Discrimination in science probably costs us more in scientific insight and scientists' well-being than anything else. AND these toxic patterns are not independent of fraud because toxic cultures create fraud pressures

Just yesterday we had a conversation in my nonprofit about removing the icon & link from the list of social media sites we include in our email signature.

Should have happened a while ago, but it's better late than never.

We have DAGs for our data, but also for our work It's easy to not realize we manage a DAG surrounding... ourselves

This week on Counting Stuff, I was cooking a bunch and was thinking about how we live in a bunch of DAGs but honestly despite knowing how to manage data DAGs, we all hate tracker tools #dataBS

www.counting-stuff.com/we-have-dags...

I may have just successfully convinced our head of tech that, no, we in fact *do not* need to spend 5 figures for a consultant firm to engage in a "discovery process" to "assess how AI can enhance our workstreams." AMA

Very curious if board members are aware of how much organizational time and energy they take up.

There are certain aspects of the dominant organizational leadership model that continues to confound me. This is absolutely one of them.

"You've Got to Survive to Thrive: What Doom Taught Me About Mission Alignment, Resource Management, and Task Prioritization"

Enjoying this chain of QT's and responses over coffee ☕ before going into the "spreadsheet mines" ⛏️ as my wife and I like to call them 😅 #databs

Just one of those little moments as a practitioner that reminds you how important it is to actually look *at* your data, not just operate on it. Especially when it's behaving weirdly.

Turns out, I was just shuffling the errors back and forth. Like someone trying to dig two holes beside each other, every time I grabbed a new shovelful of dirt and tossed it over the side I was tossing it into the other hole.

Just spent the past 20 minutes trying to organize data, getting increasingly frustrated at each pass because no matter how many times I tried to get the error count down to zero there were always just a *few* that were off.

Fair. As annoyed as I am, I should be grateful for the problems I do have...not pining for entirely new and different problems.

I don't want to say that my recent experiences at work are radicalizing me *against* the star schema per se, but boy is it funny to walk through someone else's construction project and realize that they had one hammer in hand...so every problem immediately became a nail.

Data Council Oakland '25 - YouTube

The Data Council ‘25 talks are now online, which is great because even when you attend you can’t be everywhere all at once. I’ll highlight a couple below, but there are plenty of other great talks. #databs

Trying to (kindly) remind my business colleagues that, just like with real objects in the physical world, if you don't put the data in the place where it goes it won't magically appear there when you go to look for it.

Haha music lately, but the peaky thoughts do creep in occasionally

I've been on a bit of a podcast detox lately, but it sounds like this one will be worth giving a listen

Gotta be honest, it's gonna take a lot for me to like workday. Gerrit has quite a job ahead of him.

+1 for eye masks. Once I started using them, I completely stopped waking up in the middle of the night. A shockingly simple solution, honestly.

Another episode, this time about reconfigured, an AI-assisted journaling tool. If you wish you had a better tool to capture your thoughts as you go through an analysis, have a listen!

#dataBS #datasky

The discussion and engagement was so good on this over the last few weeks that I went ahead and added 2 whole new sections to this blog post (worth checking out if you already read this!):

I reflect on the discussions and fun that we had as well as provide more resources and a call to action.