Tech Talk with Toni

 Finding a pathway from start to finish As a member of many projects in my lifetime—from growing bean plants in a Styrofoam cup for Science class to working on an Accounting group project during my university days—I think I know a thing or two about working on something with a deadline. However, outside of the well-structured educational system projects are not as neatly defined and new problems can arise along the way. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to ensure that the final product meets the expectations of stakeholders at a reasonable time.  It turns out that this is easier said that done, there are always backstories of what went wrong behind the scenes even in the most successful projects. For example: The Sydney Opera House faced massive design complexities, budget overruns, delays, and political turmoil, but through innovative solutions, public support, and perseverance, it overcame these challenges to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site and an iconic c...

Duplication refers to a type of mutation in which one or more copies of a DNA segment is produced   Today's post is inspired by a course I recently completed on DataCamp around Cleaning Data in SQL. In the context of Data Quality, we are often interested in a dimension known as "Uniqueness", which can be thought of as having one copy of each record in a table.  Now you may be asking yourself, "Why is duplication bad?"  To that, I would say that it's expensive to store copies, and it also skews data analysis. For example,  if duplicate records exist, a customer might receive multiple marketing emails for the same promotion, leading to frustration and a poor customer experience. Now, suppose we have a table named orders, to identify these duplicate records, we can use a common SQL technique with the ROW_NUMBER() window function.  WITH CTE AS ( SELECT order_id, customer_id, order_date, amount, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PAR...

Scan for a surprise If you frequent bars or restaurants these days, you will notice that most of them have done away with traditional paper-based menus and opted for a funny-looking square. As someone who believes we should strive for paperless options as much as possible, I really appreciate the use of these QR codes. Now, I don't know about you, but I feel like these pixelated squares are now everywhere, and I don't even know what the "QR" even means. So, out of curiosity, I did a quick search so you don't have to (you're welcome), and it means Quick Response. Think of Quick Response Codes as a 2D barcode that stores more data than the traditional lines we are familiar with seeing cashiers scan as we worry about our total bill in the grocery store. QR Codes can be scanned with most smartphones to quickly access information such as URLs (Uniform Resource Locator), basically the address used to access websites. With that being said, here is a brief history as ...

 The longest word in many English dictionaries is "Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis," a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust.   Today's post is inspired by the influx of Excel formula-related questions people have asked me (even though I'm not that good at it). Steve Jobs said, "If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution."  I've solved many problems by doing this well enough. When you are unable to put your problem into words, you have a harder time finding the solution since you will be Googling or prompting ChatGPT with the wrong things. Imagine a dictionary with a bunch of nonsensical definitions – pretty useless, right? That's what our problem-solving process becomes without a solid starting point. Speaking of foundations, did you know I used to obsess over the origin of words (aka etymology) in science class? Turns out, every word has a story, and it can be surprisingly illuminating. Ta...