A Procrastination Tale

Late in the evening of 30 Dec, the temperature in casa de Leonard began dropping. The thermostat continued to report a 68°F setting, our setting for cool-ish to downright cold evenings. When I first checked the in-house temperature a little after midnight, the current temperature read 64°F. By morning, the current temperature had dropped to …
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Why I Rarely Criticize

First, I do criticize. Sometimes I criticize publicly. Please realize my public criticism follows a series of events that has involved private criticism. In Business Some criticism in business is comparison. Other criticism is competition. I recently learned about “negative SEO.” I must admit, my reaction was part horror and part nausea. “Why would anyone …
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Four Questions to Ask When Hiring an Enterprise Data Consultant

It’s time to hire a consultant for your enterprise data project. That is awesome news, but a quick search for the perfect consultancy reveals a number of options (and hourly rates). What’s a CEO, CIO, CFO, VP, or Director to do? How do you choose a consultant with the right experience for your enterprise data …
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Anders Schneiderman on Changing the World

Earlier this year, Frank (@Tableteer) and I had the honor of interviewing Anders Schneiderman (LinkedIn) on Data Driven. The episode is now live and titled Anders Schneiderman on Why We Need to Prepare Communities for the Future of Work. Anders has a plan to help people leverage emerging technology to transform their destiny. Anders’ plan …
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Biml, Book Reviews, and Metadata-Driven Frameworks

I occasionally (rarely) read reviews at Amazon of books I’ve written. If I learn of a complaint regarding the book I often try to help. If a reader experiences difficulty with demos, I often offer to help, and sometimes I meet with readers to work through some difficulty related to the book (as I offered …
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Leadership and Failure

How Do People Learn? There’s ample debate about whether people learn from mistakes. Don’t believe me? Search and see for yourself. There are compelling arguments for  both learning from our mistakes and not learning from them. In engineering and software, I think we learn from our mistakes. I can hear you thinking, “Why do you think …
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Bad Presentations

In just a few short weeks I am attending the PASS Summit 2018 in Seattle. Whenever I attend an event like the Summit or SQL Saturday I attempt to attend presentations of interest to me. I love learning new stuff! Good and Less-Good Most of the presentations I attend are good. Some are really good. They …
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“You Do Not Know What You Are Doing”

Peeves make lousy pets. Knowing this doesn’t help; I still keep a few pet peeves. One of my pet peeves is this statement, “You don’t know what you are doing.” Why is this a pet peeve? It denies the obvious fact that everyone one of us, everywhere, is still learning. “My Name is Andy and …
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Experience Matters

This is a picture of Kent Bradshaw, Microsoft Certified Data Scientist. Kent and I work together at Enterprise Data & Analytics delivering data engineering, business intelligence, and data-based solutions that help businesses turn their data into actionable information. We do not do this alone, we are surrounded by an excellent team that holds diverse skills, …
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