Tag: interview

I’m Giving Video Content a Try!

As y’all may recall, last year I was lucky enough to spens some time working with the fine folks at Locally Optimistic to produce and run some AMA content for them – they ended up being more similar to traditional interviews, but folks seemed to enjoy them!

You can find those all here!

These were well received, and generated a TON of insight for folks working in the data and analytics space – but I had a few things I wanted to try doing a little differently:

  • They could be more discoverable: it was tough to know which guests talked about what, they were about an hour long so it was a big bite of content if there was only one thing the viewer was interested in – even with YouTube’s search function it’s likely folks were leaving before the parts they were interested in arrived.
  • They needed a little more social support: I tweeted about each one, but probably different parts and points of the conversation could have warranted its own outreach.
  • The live format, where we’d schedule them and invite members of the community to join, and then post afterward, was a bit tough to schedule, and we never really got the community engagement during the calls that we had hoped for.

So, I’m putting together some videos that hopefully are a step in the right direction – I’ll chat with similar folks, luminaries in the data and analytics space, and then publish the entire conversation, but also smaller chunks (ideally one per topic) which can be posted separately so that folks who are only interested in, say, data career ladders, can easily find and watch only that piece.

I still absolutely have a lot to learn – both about being a data professional as well as producing and sharing video content! – but, I’m giving it a try! I’m also hoping to use this energy to help carry me into blogging more, once more – but that’s a perennial hope, isn’t it?

With no further ado, here is the first full-length conversation, with my friends Stephen and Emilie – I think you’re going to like it!

I’m Doing Live Video Interviews!

This post is a very exciting announcement for me, so I won’t do the typical online-content thing where I tell you a big, narrative tale about me and my values before I actually do the announcing – I’ll do that after.

This coming Monday – TOMORROW – June 24th, at 4PM EST, I’ll be doing the first of many live-streamed video Ask-Me-Anything style interviews with professionals working at the intersection of data and analytics!

(If you’re reading this and want to make a Google Calendar event right this minute, you know what, here’s the Zoom link: https://brooklyndata.zoom.us/j/501489762 )

This first session I’ll be sitting down with my friend and yours, the singular Matt Mazur, once my colleague at Automattic, then a member of the eminent customer-support software Help Scout, and now a free agent, applying his immense experience and insight to problems of analysis and data management for a number of companies, all of which are lucky to have him.

I’m putting this interview together in partnership with the Locally Optimistic team, who I have gotten to know over the last few months and have just been, honestly, consistently impressed!

I first joined the Locally Optimistic community via their blog, as I think is also the case for many of the current members of that Slack instance. As its membership has grown, it’s been a really excellent source of insight and camaraderie: I got to meet a few folks in person at a Looker meetup in NYC (I’m just a drive up the Hudson, remember), as well as at the Marketing Analysis and Data Science conference out in San Francisco, earlier this year.

Ever since I shuttered my podcast about hop farming (more about that here), I’ve missed the kind of social access that doing regular interviews can offer: I am by nature an inquisitive person (some might uncharitably say nosy), and having access to a socially acceptable way to totally pepper someone with questions was in so many ways a rewarding experience for me.

In some ways, Trellis to Table (the hop podcast referenced above) was about connecting small groups and individuals involved in small-scale hop farming, and helping them to share value: by interviewing this totally novel little crew of twenty-something first time farmers in Minnesota, their lessons and energy could leapfrog to the lifetime farmers in Upstate NY, in South Carolina, and suddenly this value had exploded across a network that didn’t even exist before – that was the big motivation for me, by the end.

I think in some ways the intersection of software engineering, data analysis, and business intelligence is in a similar place – there’s a good post about this new type of professional, the Analytics Engineer, on LO – there is this really large, and growing, community of folks whose work doesn’t yet have a clear set of job titles, or a clear sense of what their career progression might look like.

In tapping the Locally Optimistic community for exciting, interesting folks to engage in these video conversations, we can start to create a better shared understanding of our work, and what our work looks like, and how we can get better both as individuals but also as a community of practice.

I’m very excited to get back into the interview game: it’s something I really enjoy, and I hope that y’all are able to get a lot out of it as well.

Matt and I will talk about his professional journey, which has taken him from an officer in the Air Force, to leading an analytics team, to starting his own software business and becoming a business intelligence consultant.

We’ll also explore the world of internal organizational communication, working with non-data teams, and having an impact as a data analyst.I’m very excited to get back into the interview game: it’s something I really enjoy, and I hope that y’all are able to get a lot out of it as well.

As one last reminder, this first session is this coming Monday – TOMORROW – June 24th, at 4PM EST

Here’s the Zoom link: https://brooklyndata.zoom.us/j/501489762

If you want to be super cool, I am also going to be trying to live-stream this via my Twitch channel, which I am literally creating just for this series (!) here: My Real Not a Joke Twitch Stream