Counting Our Blessings

At CompassRed — the Thanksgiving Holiday has quickly become one of our favorites. Though we are young — we have been shaped by the experiences that so many friends have allowed us to experience that we feel like we have lived a lifetime. These friends challenge us to push ourselves harder every morning or spend a sleepless night learning about the next principles in Deep Learning or Neural Networks. If we haven’t said “thank you” to our clients, partners and colleagues enough — we hope you hear us now.

For the support of our spouses, partners, children now (and the ones that are coming!), friends, and mentors, we feel fortunate that you are empathetic and supportive in our passionate purpose to save the world with data. In addition to those physically close to us in our life, we are thankful for the online communities where we have learned so much through knowledge sharing. Whether they are based around Twitter hashtags, Slack groups or weekly emails, learnings from others online have increased our skills and awareness of what’s possible in our data analyst and data science roles. Groups like the #measure community/Slack group for digital analysts, the #Rstats community (R weekly emails, Tidy Tuesday, and the Shiny Developer Series to name a few resources), and the relatively new Data Visualization Society/Slack group. To the wider data community — everyone is so incredibly supportive of new ideas and innovation — it brings us calm knowing that we are collectively changing the world every day.

We are super grateful to our colleagues (better known as our “second family”) who we share our awake hours with every day. It’s very motivating to see how much we’ve grown over the past year and how much runway we have in front of us.

And finally — those in our community who work tirelessly to make the community around us better. Our friends at Habitat For Humanity, The Delaware Prosperity Partnership, Girls on the Run, and so many other groups that wake up everyday to selfishly give of themselves so we can focus on our purpose and mission.

Happy Thanksgiving from your friends at CompassRed.