I’m just a girl in the world.
… but that’s not all that I’ll ever be.
In fact, I’m a girl in a world of code and math and men. Sounds kinda fun, huh?
I’ve always been into math. Doesn’t mean it’s always been my strongest suit, but I’ve enjoyed it. Math was the first homework I did every night when I was a kid. I mean, really, who goes home and smiles while working through Algebra problems? /me = weirdo! Somehow, it just made more sense than the other subjects. (Especially physics… don’t even get me started on how much of physics is made of lies)
As the math got harder, the need to write code to do it grew. Trust me, I fought it as long as I could. I swore up and down that I, as an Economics major for undergrad, would NEVER need to learn code. Boy, was I ever wrong on that one!
Since those days of yore (a.k.a. college), I’ve had a steadily increasing progression of code knowledge. Not saying I’m an expert in any given coding language, but rather that I’ve used code to solve a lot of problems and answer a lot of questions. And, most of the time, I’ve done it using a combination of really simple pieces. No fancy Perl or Java programming, just bunches of logic thrown in with basic commands.
The end result is always to derive insights and answer business questions. It’s all well and good to use programming to make systems talk to one another. If there’s no problem being solved then you might as well chalk it up to academic interest. So my goal is to figure out how data drives results and influence decisions to improve business. Sounds easy enough. And yet, every time I listen in on another presentation where someone talks to me about the coding language used to generate the result or shows a copy/paste job of an Excel table into PowerPoint with absolutely zero explanation of why I care, I have to wonder if it really is that easy. Something tells me it’s not. And something tells me that there are people out there looking to find easier ways to get at the insights lurking amidst the sea of numbers.
This blog is a resource. It’s not my waxing poetic about how amazing I am at code (because I’m not) or droning about how important it is to show a business reason and implication for what you present with data (though it is). Rather, it is here to provide answers to problems that I may or may not have figured out a decent way to get around and to help coach young BI folks or data miners or whatever you want to call yourselves on how to translate numbers to business.
I hope that those visiting will comment and ask questions and provide feedback – good, bad or indifferent. I hope that we will all learn or try something new. Most of all, I hope that you find at least something interesting on here and please do contact me to let me know if you do.