Data quality, MLOps, and Great Expectations

[Coalesce 2024] Boost your data literacy with 2 key concepts

The dbt Labs 2024 State of Analytics Engineering report highlights that stakeholder data literacy remains a problem in the modern data workplace. Data stakeholders and data professionals can both benefit from learning foundational data literacy concepts that foster their ability to reason about working with data in a business environment. In this talk, I cover two key concepts that I've applied in my own career when framing data fundamentals: “the data supply chain” and “ML in a nutshell.”

Data Quality: Validating the Data Supply Chain

Data fuels the modern world. Organizations increasingly leverage data to build complex ecosystems, infrastructure, and products. Whether your interest is analytics-informed decision making, training the latest model, building a data-intensive application, or something in between, the quality of your data is fundamental to your outcomes. In this introductory talk, we’ll discuss the importance of data quality, common data quality dimensions, data quality across the organization, mechanisms to assess data quality, and open source Python tooling for data quality.

Building a Career in Tech: Practical Tips & Opinionated Advice

You've read the news. Data Scientist is consistently ranked as one of the Hottest/Sexiest/Insert-Alluring-Adjective-Here jobs on the market. Further, tech jobs continue to top yearly "Best .* Job" lists. You think it would be pretty sweet to launch and grow your career in tech, maybe even in data science specifically. However, all these glowing listicles seem to leave out the most critical detail... what is a career in tech *really* like? Join me for a giphy-fueled tour of the observations and insights that I've gleaned during a decade+ career in industry.

An Introduction to Data Linking

In this talk, we'll cover the basics of data linking: the need for data linking, how it works, its challenges, and practical knowledge for applying data linking to your own use cases. In the workshop version of this talk, we'll also explore data linking hands-on with Python.

Improving your data visualization flow with Altair and Vega-Lite

If you're a Pythonista whose data visualization process could use a makeover, then this talk is for you. We'll identify the elements of an effective data visualization flow and explore how the Altair and Vega-Lite stack can improve your own data visualization practice. (09-2021: Added code examples)

pytest

This is a mostly complete, but still in-progress, tutorial on the excellent Python pytest library. Learning to write comprehensive test suites for your code will level-up your software game, and pytest is a fantastic tool to use if you develop in Python. #testsarethebest

To Explore or To Exploit: Reinforcement Learning Basics

If you're curious about reinforcement learning, or have an unnaturally enthusiastic nostalgia for Chex Quest, you'll find something to enjoy and learn in this informal introduction to RL.