DAYMN — 22 Aug 2021
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I read a lot of informative and thought-provoking articles every week, and share them immediately in a piecemeal fashion, with friends and colleagues.
One, it is hard to find these articles again — when you need them — despite using a combination of Read-Later tools. And second, the nature of these fleeting shares are quite ephemeral making it hard to retain the insights in this age of information overload.
So, I thought it would be a better practice to batch and share the top 5 articles I read every week along with a short write-up on what was interesting in these articles.
Here are the top 5 articles from this past week — please do share your feedback & thoughts!
1. Codex to translate English commands into code
Open AI is releasing a new machine learning tool that translates the English language into code. The software is called Codex and is designed to speed up the work of professional programmers, as well as help amateurs get started coding. While this looks to be in its infancy right now, once it develops into a full-fledged application — it can truly democratise programming for all!
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/10/22618128/openai-codex-natural-language-into-code-api-beta-access
Call out? Codex is built on the top of GPT-3, OpenAI’s language generation model, which was trained on a sizable chunk of the internet, and as a result can generate and parse the written word in impressive ways.
2. Systems & Component for Machine Learning Ops
ML Ops is all the rage right now, and a recent article by Kabir Nagrecha talks beautifully to the various components and challenges in setting up an end to end ML pipeline, that actually does something and is not an architecture diagram on a powerpoint preso. A beautifully written must-read with some good practical tips for those getting their ML code into production.
Call out? Introduction and connection to this wonderful paper on the technical debt in ML Systems by D. Sculley
3. Future of BI is Open-Source
Choice of BI tools is one of those topics which is bound to cause as big an argument as supporting for political party of your choice or an even bigger schism than your religion vs someone else’s. While that exists, I remain to this day a strong believer in the power of open source breaking a lot of those shackles and being the true deliverer of technology for everyone.
https://maximebeauchemin.medium.com/the-future-of-business-intelligence-is-open-source-9b654595773a
Written by someone I look up to as an inspiration — Maxime Beauchemin — and the builder of the awesome Superset paradigm, this is a great article reasoning why Open Source BI like Superset is a great start for those starting on their BI journeys and are not constrained by enterprise needs. Shout out to Preset.io which is built on top of Superset. Give it a shot for sure!
Call out? Clearly open source is extremely disruptive as it provides freedom and a set of guaranties that really matter when it comes to adopting software. Even more clearly, these guaranties fully apply when it comes to business intelligence. More specifically around business intelligence, Apache Superset has matured to a level where it’s a very compelling choice over the proprietary solution.
4. Five Strategies To Set Up Chief Data Offices To Fail
As a relatively freshly minted CDO (Chief Data Officer) myself, I absolutely enjoyed reading this great piece by Pradeep Menon who writes so elegantly about the top 5 reasons CDOs often fail, and the reason behind them. While 68% of Fortune 500 companies now have a CDO compared to 17% in 2012, they still don’t know exactly what to expect from them and why.
https://hbr.org/2021/08/why-do-chief-data-officers-have-such-short-tenures
Call out? Classifying the CDO role as a technology role is the first strategy to set up the CDO for failure. Classifying the CDO as a technology role constraints the vision of the role. It ensures that the role is bogged down by the operational aspects of data.
5. Help Your Managers Help You
I’ve been a big fan of Julia Evan’s well-written blog on things your managers might not know and won’t ever know until we tell them ourselves. Often times we find ourselves disappointed that our managers seem to neglect or overlook our needs — I know this only all too well as someone who helps my leaders manage their teams. As with everything, it is first important to raise awareness and education on what we need to bring to our manager’s attention and how. This article greatly helps on that front.
https://jvns.ca/blog/things-your-manager-might-not-know/
Call out? Your manager doesn’t (and can’t!) know every single detail about what you do in your job, and being aware of what they might not know and giving them the information they need to do their job well makes everyone’s job a lot easier.
Have a wonderful week ahead everyone, hope at least one of these articles is exciting reading material for you, and made you think for a moment!
