https://anchor.fm/census/episodes/Data-Disasters-The-Untold-Stories---Operational-Analytics-Conference-2021-ev8e5f

Olia (00:00): Hi everyone. We're happy you can join us. My name is Olia. I'm a customer data architect here at Census. You might also know me from Twitter, where I post my best attempt at Jake data jokes, and a whole lot of data memes, either or. There's more and more companies are starting to put data front and center. We are seeing massive shifts in how teams are starting to actually use this data, and this transformation has given rise to a whole new set of conversations in the data ecosystem. Census is hosting the operational analytics conference this week to create a space for these intimate conversations with data pioneers and leading practitioners about data related lessons learned, the evolution of data across teams, processes, company, culture, career advice, and many other things. As part of this week long conference, today's session will focus on data disasters, the untold stories.

Olia (00:50): We all know that customer case studies often highlight the shiny awesome parts of what works in data, but we rarely hear about the messy, painful, scary, sad, often scouting details. We'll discuss the battle scars we have from solving some of these problems today. Before I let my fellow panelists introduce themselves, I'll just cover a couple of housekeeping items. First off, I highly suggest you click on the tiny little green icon next to data club on clubhouse, to get notified about any future sessions we have. This way you don't have to add it to your calendar, you'll just get a notification from the app. It's awesome. Very efficient. Also, this session is being recorded. For those of you who are interested in coming up to chat and ask questions by doing so, you are consenting to us that using your words and image in the recording related to this event. Again, following the session, the recording and transcription will be available on our website, get census.com.

Olia (01:45): There is a rumor that at the end of the session, we will go off the record in the last few minutes or so. For those of you that want to share all this data stories and do so in a safe space, we can do that. Boris said, we might even give out an award for the best/worst/best worst story, so who knows. Anything can happen. Finally, for those of you in the audience, we encourage participation. So please raise your hand to ask a question or provide your own data disaster tale, we'll bring it up on stage. This is meant to be pretty casual. I think we all have a lot of great stories. You can start with the group that we have here, but definitely want to hear from you as well. All right. I think that wraps up all my housekeeping items, so let's hear from the panelists. I think we have a couple of people here. Jeff, if you want to start us off, maybe share a few sentences about who you are and what you do.

Jeff Sloan (02:36): Sure. I'm Jeff Sloan. Most recently I was a data product manager for Treatwell, which is a hair and beauty booking marketplace in Europe. I was working with our data engineering and analytics engineering functions. My background's in business intelligence or analytics engineering as it's come to be known, starting at RJ metrics, a long gong SAS platform at BI, but also continuing to consult to stay fresh and current on technical stuff.

Olia (03:06): Awesome. Julie, do you want to go next?

Julie Baden (03:09): Sure. Hi everyone. I'm Julie Baden head of analytics at Clearbit. Clearbit's a data provider that helps reach, find, and personalize for your target market, and it's a very interesting challenge to be head of analytics at a company that specializes in data, so I have quite a few tails.

Olia (03:29): Awesome. Can't wait to hear those. Eric, do you want to go next?

Eric (03:33): Yeah, sure. I'm Eric, I'm from Shopify. I've been here for about three years. Currently a senior data platform engineer. Some of the things I work on are basically building, sorry, if you hear my cat meowing, my phone on my desk doesn't work that well.

Olia (03:53): Cats are welcome.

Eric (03:56): I've been building a SQL data platform called Seamster, and then previously I worked on building our spark based data platform, and previous to that, I worked on creating a guest data as a service to some Shopify's merchants, so a lot of stories from there.

Olia (04:17): Awesome. All right. I guess we can wrap the intros up with Brooks.

Brooks Taylor (04:22): Hi everyone. My name is Brooks Taylor. I'm a data scientist at Segment, I've been there for about two years. Like Julie, it's definitely an interesting position I've found to be the data guy at a data company. Before Segment, I was doing something pretty different. I actually just learned today that one of my papers from 2015 got published this morning. To give you a flavor of what I worked on, it's called Six Distinct NF Kappa B signaling Cotons convey discrete information to distinguish stimuli and enable appropriate macrophage responses. This is all still pretty new for me, I think, based on where-

Boris (04:59): Is that biology? Just so I can guess.

Brooks Taylor (05:00): Yeah it is. It is seminology.

Boris (05:02): Al right cool. High school biology for the win.

Olia (05:09): I'm glad you knew that was biology, because I had no idea.

Boris (05:16): I'm just going to crack jokes. I'm Boris in case people who haven't met me. I run most of the Census and really just sit in the corner and make jokes, and I'm going to sit here and try to think about what's a good prize for who has the, either the saddest or a funniest or best disaster stories.

Olia (05:33): Hopefully not the saddest one.