All Hands on Data #92
The madness of March is almost over. For your sanity, dive into our favorite articles and podcasts from this week.
Article Recommendations
What is the significance of color in data visualization?
Red means stop. Green means go. Yellow is happy. We associate color with feelings, information, and decision making more than we think in our day to day lives. So do we do the same with data? Color speaks to the audience and allows businesses to communicate messages with a greater effect. It evokes emotion, builds connections, creates a story, and provides depth. So why not begin thinking a bit more about its use in your data visualization? - Reed Cowan
A beginner's guide to building a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) application from scratch
As someone trying to get more involved with AI, I had constantly heard about RAG but had yet to explore it myself. Bill simplifies the concept, the code, and provides visuals to make sure everything is well understood. It's one of the best introductions I've had to a concept. Once you finish this tutorial, there's 4 more excellent tutorials to go through! - Blake Burch
Enabling near real-time data analytics on the data lake
The post provides a really neat and moderately technical overview of how to improve an often overlooked aspect of data lakes: writing latency. If you're frequently updating the data lake, it can have negative downstream impact on query performance. The authors address this by breaking down the data source frequency and format and building a system designed to scale with demand. - John Forstmeier
Reproducible data science with Nix, part 6 -- CI/CD has never been easier
I'm trying to get into Nix and learn more about it. This definitely wets the appetite and shows a good example use case with a language and use case I'm unfamiliar with. Without a data background, it's interesting to see other disciplines use reproducibility. - Eric Elsken
Podcast Recommendations
DataFramed, Ep 188 - Scaling Enterprise Analytics with Libby Duane Adams, Chief Advocacy Officer and Co-Founder of Alteryx
This podcast episode explores how organizations can scale their data analytics capabilities to get more value from their data. Experienced analytics leader Libby Duane Adams provides advice on overcoming common challenges like data governance, ensuring data privacy and security, developing employees' data skills, and calculating the business impact of analytics initiatives.
Data Skeptic - What You Know About Intelligence is Wrong
In this insightful interview, behavior analyst Hank Schlinger reveals how intelligence is more of an adjective describing behavior, not an inherent trait. He unpacks why psychology struggles to define vague concepts like intelligence and consciousness, preferring instead to focus on measurable actions.