10 tips for making meetings better — I realized we had a major problem. A colleague, distraught, pulled me aside. She’d had a bad meeting — one of the ones where your soul ebbs away while the clock laughs at you. I’d heard it all before, that day, from four other people. The worst part? They weren’t…

Learn the most important leadership skill from a prison interview — Listening is the most important leadership skill, and sometimes, the best example to learn from is a bad one. So here, I present to you, my favorite example of a poor listener, the prison interview of the serial killer, Paul Bernardo. Although best known for committing a series of rapes…

Why the service for “keeping everyone’s chats and files safe” can no longer be trusted — I can’t publish the article I’ve already written … morally speaking. Last month, I started writing a new series on Terraform. This week, I intended to publish the third installment on increased security. The issue: I’m using the third-party service, Keybase. It’s featured in Terraform’s documentation — several times. And…

One question that disqualifies 95% of Data Science Candidates — I’m not trying to grill you. The bar’s not high on the telephone interview. The next step, the face-to-face, means meeting a few members of the team. They’ll grill you. My job is to screen out the uncomfortably bad experiences. I’m just trying to protect them and not waste your…

Achieving maintainability with some of Terraform’s more advanced features. — Here, in part 2, our goal is maintainability. We’ll take a data-driven approach. Adding new users will be mere data entry. Along the way, we’ll split our project into multiple files, logically. That’ll make it easier to add more functionality in part 3 and beyond. In part 1, we covered…

A definition based in data and historical context — Data Engineering is on a meteoric rise. As a proportion of jobs advertised in the UK, data engineering has more than doubled over that past two years. At 1.5%, that’s nearly 2,200 open positions. By comparison, “Software Engineer” makes up about 4.6%. And “Project Manager” 3.1%. Data Engineering is even…

Why I’ll never go back to daily or hourly billing — I’ve been contracting for over a decade, and before that, I worked for a consultancy. Daily rates are the norm in the UK, but three years ago, I started something new, fixed-price contracts. My motivation at the time was mostly curiosity. Perhaps I just wanted something new. Today my motivations…

A less-than-gentle introduction using a real-world example — Terraform allows you to set up infrastructure across a wide variety of vendors and platforms. I love it because it’s declarative-meaning you just say what it is your want and Terraform figures out how to get there. There are many good introductions to Terraform out there, but they lack that…

If you think your data scientists and engineers can get by on just email and phone calls, you are in for a rude awakening. While IT has their hands full with broader company needs, let’s see look at some data science tools for working effectively as a team. As a…