I just completed the testing of a new program I wrote. 500 lines of well-commented code, making debugging easy if necessary. With this program, the reports we run daily in the morning would take 10 minutes instead of the usual hour, and fully-automated too. Without any manual inputs, the potential failure points owing to manual... Continue Reading →
On antifragility and new stuff
Taleb once again scores with me with his book on “antifragility”. Like his book on randomness and black swans, this book has opened my mind to a concept that I’ve intuitively felt but never been able to put down in words. I wrote once about “destroying things” to love them more – making new things... Continue Reading →
Analytics Adoption: Evolutionary vs. Revolutionary Technology
In this post about analytics adoption, I'd like to start with a short story. The wife and I got ourselves each a Samsung Galaxy S4 over the weekend. Though it’s a great phone, we couldn’t help but feel that there was a distinct lack of a “wow” factor. We both moved to the S4 from... Continue Reading →
User requests are like hunger pangs
“So, when is the [request] going to be ready?” he asks me, the fourth person to ask in a one-week period. This, I think to myself, is probably real hunger. “I’m working on it,” I reply, which means I’m waiting it out to determine how important the request really is. The moment I can confidently... Continue Reading →
Release Me
I first heard this song on TV. It was an advertisement for Saab. I now listen to it whenever I feel "contained". While on a run. While on the job.
What do you do? I’m an analyst.
“So,” my wife’s friend asks, “what do you do?” I pause for a moment, prepare to say “business analyst”, but then decide not to because I didn’t think she’d understand what I did. I look at my wife and ask her, “what do I do?”, hoping she'd have a better answer. My wife looks at... Continue Reading →
I'm a sucker for personality tests. Here's one I haven't taken (and believe me I've taken many) which though I wouldn't read too much into its results, does seem in its own little way pretty accurate: ColorQuiz (I suppose one reason I like personality tests is that I'm always amazed when they get things right, and... Continue Reading →
Colour Quiz
On the Boston Marathon Bombings
I haven't written about it. I didn't think I would. But I think I should. The tragedy at the Boston Marathon has hit me worse than I'd thought. (“Why do you look so sad?” the wife asked. “I don’t know,” I replied.) I’m an avid runner, and one who has dreamt of qualifying for Boston... Continue Reading →
Automated out of a job
“Most of the time,” my friend told me,” they were just doing really manual work. Copying and pasting, doing very routine things that could have been automated. And they’d do these things for 8 or 9 hours a day, sometimes more. They’d come back on Saturdays just to finish their work.” He was talking about... Continue Reading →
I want to live a positively interesting life
Because that's the best way I know of living a "good" life. To live the good life, I'll want to live a positively interesting life. There's something I heard or read about before about performance measurement: that if you want to positively reinforce the behaviour of someone, you should not reward based on outcome, but rather... Continue Reading →
