Archive - Practical Data Science

My peers at Mozilla are running workshops on opportunity sizing. If you're unfamiliar, opportunity sizing is when you take some broad guesses at how…

Apr 15, 2021

Last month I gave a talk at csv,conf on "Getting Credit for Invisible Work". The (amazing) csv,conf organizers just published a recording of the talk…

Jun 4, 2021

My vet told me I should stop feeding my dog grain-free dog food. Apparently, grain-free dog food is linked with a heart condition called Dilated…

Feb 18

Leading with Data - Cascading Metrics It's surprisingly hard to lead a company with data. There's a lot written about how to set good goals and how to…

Dec 9, 2020

I spent some time earlier this year orchestrating a massive experiment for Firefox. We launched a bunch of new features with Firefox 80 and we wanted to…

Jan 7, 2021

Last week, one of my peers asked me to explain what I meant by "Data Intuition", and I realized I really didn't have a good definition. That's a…

Oct 20, 2020

Economists have a handy phrase to describe a fairly common fallacy: "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" meaning "After, therefore because". Wikipedia has an…

Jun 17, 2020

I was talking with Mark Reid about some of the problems with Coding in a GUI. He nailed part of the problem with soundbite too good not to share: "If…

Jun 27, 2018

I was talking about tooling with Mark Reid a few weeks ago. I've been trying to find a way to simplify sharing analyses throughout the company. This is…

Dec 12, 2019

I'm ramping up on a project to understand how Firefox retains users. Right now I'm trying to build some context quickly. For example, what's our monthly…

Dec 13, 2019

This is my first job making data tools that other people use. In the past, I've always been a data scientist - a consumer of these tools. I'm learning a…

Jun 15, 2017

Every other week, I go through my todo list and decide where I should focus my attention. I review a list of prompts that help me choose important work…

Jul 10, 2020

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