I referred to this a little earlier but the content of this blog may not end up being exactly what I had originally planned. And that’s totally OK.

Now that I’ve been in this field for a while (“Business Intelligence” - 1.5 years and analytics in general for another few years prior to that), and seen various segments of business, worked with many different teams of stakeholders, been laid off, and seen others get laid off, I’ve started to think more meta about the field. In this post I’ll specifically talk about analytics team organizational structuring that I’ve experienced, and, surprise–I have problems with all of them! (Not to worry, the pros are always worth considering as well)

2020 was definitely a year to remember. I try to remember the good and the bad together (more on that below). In this long and isolated time, I’ve taken some time to re-think what I’m good at, what I’ve learned, and what I can contribute publicly. I’ve decided to perhaps focus on business intelligence subjects, since that is the turn my career seems to have taken for now. Oh also, I updated my hugo theme.

A quick note before I start

I say, “Hello World, Again”, because after my first immediate interest in starting a technical blog, I ended bogged down in work, an online course, and personal life things that required me to take some more breaks from my personal projects. I couldn’t keep up with my goals of blogging in 2019, and although 2020 doesn’t seem to be slowing down for me, I am currently sitting in my hotel room inspired and motivated to start up this blog again.

I use the data.table package quite a bit at work and it’s become my preferred way to work with data in R, even with smaller data sizes. As much as the tidyverse is readable and smart, there is something about data.table syntax that I’ve really come to appreciate. It’s harder to read, but quicker to type. But the readability becomes an issue sometimes, since I might forget tips and tricks that have been useful in the past.

So I thought I’d make my first post here about the process for me, a non-web-developer, non-guru-nor-R-master to create this blog, host it, and then tie it to this domain. TL;DR not 100% smooth for the truest of newbies, but mostly painless.