This is me and that's what I'm interested in.
A message lands in the analyst’s chat: “Can you pull the new FTS numbers?” It feels like a thirty-second favour. It isn’t. Hidden inside that one sentence are half a dozen unasked questions: which metric, which season, which period, compared to what, and, least asked of all, for what decision.... Read more: Why 'becoming data-driven' keeps falling short
In the previous post I described how to load Parquet exports into a local DuckDB database — a fast, free, file-based data warehouse you can have running in an afternoon. The raw tables are queryable straight away. But to turn them into something reliable, documented, and ready for an analytics... Read more: dbt on DuckDB — from raw tables to mart models
Many business systems don’t offer a live database connection. They export data periodically — one Parquet file per table, dropped into a folder. That works fine for a one-off look. It becomes a problem the moment you want to join tables, apply consistent transformations, or connect the data to an... Read more: A personal data warehouse — free, fast, and local
It happens from time to time that I’m using datasets which include physical addresses that need to be turned into longitude/latitude data. For example, when working with data on mass shootings in the US, the Gun Violence Archive GVA provides physical addresses only. So, how to get long/lat data? Well,... Read more: Geocoding made easy
I came across this topic in a recent LinkedIn post by investigative journalist Daniel Drepper. An international research network investigated the spread of PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) to unveil the scale of pollution. This group of chemicals are linked to various deseases such as cancer and infertility. As a... Read more: PFAS Map
