I've been kicking around this thought for a year or so now - to the outsider a career in data looks like a technical path. The data practitioner learns SQL, how to query data stored in a database somewhere using SQL, and if you know enough SQL you can answer any question whose artifacts are stored in that database somewhere.

The reality is that SQL is the very last mile. SQL is code, and so it looks to the non-practitioner like the act of creation, like code written in any imperative...

"Run your data team like it's a product team" was a common refrain at the DBT conference for the last two years. What does that mean? I am still figuring that out, but I have had an aha in the last few weeks about what a "data product" is, exactly.

Your standard software development process requires two main components to deliver the Things - a software developer and her wits. She takes those wits and expresses them into a text editor, and thereby makes something from truly...

So tracking pixels. They sound awful. They sort of are, but we all use them. One just fired off on you a minute ago when you loaded this page. That's how Google Analytics works its magic. But how do they work? The GA tracking code is Javascript and doesn't say anything about an image pixel.

Step inside...

Dat JS

So that javascript does a few things, primarily it creates another javascript tag that pulls down the real "payload", which is a hackerish term for "a bigger ball of...

If you're a web developer, I'm sure you've placed this snippet of code more into more than a few projects.

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(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');

ga('create', 'UA-XXXX-Y',...