Celebrating our second anniversary of Data Science at Microsoft
The journey continues!
Data Science at Microsoft — the online publication on Medium.com you’re reading now — is two years old on January 9. What a journey it’s been!
When we started, the pandemic was not yet a fact of daily life in much of the world. The organization we were a part of was a much smaller one, and with some different people. Some were skeptical about our undertaking with DS@M, as we call it internally. How could we write about our data science work publicly without exposing proprietary information? How would we be able to establish and maintain an online publication that would require regular content? How receptive would those outside Microsoft be to reading about our data science work?
Two years later, the world has changed quite a bit — and so has DS@M. Many people, if they work for specific companies that have required it, have been away from their offices (working “virtually,” as well call it at Microsoft) for nearly two years. Everyone on the planet, regardless of walk of life, has experienced unexpected twists and turns from the pandemic that have affected lives and loved ones in ways large and small. Contributors to DS@M, both on the authoring and editorial side, have changed, just as our sponsoring organization, now called Microsoft Cloud Data Sciences, has changed. But through it all, we’ve built up DS@M from scratch to the point that we are now approaching publication of our hundredth article — and we now have more than 2,500 followers. Our content contributors come from across Microsoft, eager to share their expertise and experience in the data sciences with a wide audience. If we can do this during a pandemic, who knows what else we can do when the world finally emerges from it?
As I wrote one year ago for our first anniversary, our mission for DS@M remains to share our data sciences best practices, discuss the value of our work, show our impact on the business, and connect with the broader data sciences community. The social journalism platform enabled by Medium enables us to tell the story of Microsoft data science and share it with business decision-makers, customers, partners, other data scientists, students, and even prospective employees, whether the topic is on data science methods, data visualization, data engineering, organization, professional development, or people.
If DS@M has provided you, our reader, with ideas about how to pursue your own work in the data sciences, provided a window into ways that data science at Microsoft is done, or helped you feel connected with the larger data sciences community, then we’ve accomplished at least part of what we set out to do. Just as we would have no online publication without our scores of contributors, the editorial collaborations of many, or without support from our executives, we would only be talking to ourselves without you, for whom we publish this work. I’m very grateful to each of you for reading DS@M, I look forward to what we will be sharing with you here in the coming year, and I wish you and all of us the very best as we begin 2022 together.
Casey Doyle is managing editor of Data Science at Microsoft.
