ISSUE 412  ·   November 8, 2022

Trends

Everything I know about Mastodon

Who knows how things will ultimately play out but the data community on Twitter seems to be unraveling. Mastodon is an obvious Twitter alternative but it's different than Twitter. This is the best post I've seen on Mastodon, including details on where to go, how to set things up, key differences from Twitter, how to find the data community and more.
Danielle Navarro 

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Tutorials, Projects & Opinions

No, you don’t need MLOps

Over the past year or so, MLOps has taken on a life of its own and many things that are sold as MLOps aren't needed for most teams. In this post, Lak Lakshmanan takes a look at the original problems, how they can be addressed in today’s ML frameworks, and why additional complexity beyond keep-it-simple solutions is often unnecessary.
Lak Lakshmanan

Caveats and Limitations of A/B Testing at Growth Tech Companies

A/B tests are the gold standard of user testing, but there are some fundamental limitations that aren't always obvious. This is an insightful longread on things to watch for.
ryx, r | W.D.

Command-line data analytics made easy

SpyQL is a query language that combines the simplicity and structure of SQL with the power and readability of Python. It's lightweight, easy to use and will feel familiar if you already work with Python or SQL. Here's a practical tutorial for getting started.
Daniel C. Moura

Code & Tools

Raster4ML

Raster4ML is a python package that extracts ML-ready datasets from geospatial raster data and shapefiles. The package aims to aid geospatial researchers and scientists to extract meaningful features easily so they can focus more on model training and reproducibility.
GitHub | Remote Sensing Lab

Resources

Forecasting: Principles and Practice (3rd ed)

Great study guide and reference for forecasting methods. Examples use R with many datasets taken from the authors' own consulting experience. In this third edition, all chapters have been updated to cover the latest research and methods. Free to read online.
Rob J Hyndman and George Athanasopoulos

Career

New Opportunities

The Data Elixir Job Board currently has 47+ listings for remote positions, including roles for data scientists, data analysts, researchers, data architects, machine learning engineers, and more. The roles cover a variety of job levels, from mid-level to Director.
Data Elixir Talent Collective

Data Visualization

Should you stop using bullet graphs?

Nick Desbarats has taught dashboard design to thousands of workshop participants and along the way, he noticed a variety of downsides with bullet graphs. In this post, he shows how bullet graphs work, typical issues, and he introduces an alternative chart type he calls "action dots" that are simpler and easier to understand. 
Nightingale | Nick Desbarats

How to access, analyze & visualize your Twitter data

Great notebook to help you download your Twitter data and analyze it locally in a searchable interface. There are a variety of visualizations here and everything is easy to modify and build on. Definitely, do this if you're thinking about leaving Twitter. 
Observable | Ian Johnson

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