Tech Talk with Toni

  Russian nesting dolls make for a great analogy of ordinal data, where each subsequent doll is larger or smaller than the previous one, representing a ranking or order As someone with a background in natural sciences, I have a solid understanding of the difference between quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data is anything that can be measured - for example, the atmospheric pressure can be measured using a barometer. It's the kind of data that can answer life's most pressing questions, such as 'How many more hours until Friday?' and 'How much caffeine from Starbucks is too much?' On the other hand, qualitative analysis provides a description of something - for instance, you may have brown hair and be of Asian descent. However, these two categories of data are like Russian nesting dolls that can be further divided into sub-categories that unpack the characteristics of the data even more. Here are the respective subcategories of quantitative and qual...

  A matrix of dots that you did not bother to count Let's face it, working with exponentially expanding datasets can be both exciting and overwhelming. Imagine dealing with a dataset of 22 million rows - that's a lot of information to process!  The question is, can your ETL process handle it?  This is a problem that I faced this week, and I had to find a way to improve the performance of the process that updates a dashboard as it was taking a decade to update. The initial question that crossed my mind was, "What was the actual size of this dataset?" At first, I mistakenly assumed that the dataset contained between 1 and 6 million rows. A quick COUNT(*) query made it clear that my estimate was way off and also provided me with some clarity to the problem. That dataset was a behemoth, it probably had its own gravitational pull! The sad truth was that the process was not scalable, and it was clear that immediate improvements were necessary. Here are a three tips that I h...

IBM 350 Disk Storage:  a huge stack of metal plates that could store up to 5,000,000 characters In school, you learn the ropes of programming and might even find yourself tackling odd assignments, like creating a cricket simulator in C++ in just two weeks.  In the professional world, ad hoc report requests can cause anxiety. Gone are the days of set deadlines.  Fear not, as you can now utilize low-code software to easily create programs by dragging and dropping tools for a wide range of tasks. Today, our focus will be on the ETL process. In case you're not familiar with the acronym ETL, it stands for Extract, Transform, and Load - the essential steps in the data pipeline. This process involves extracting data from multiple sources, transforming it into a desired format or structure, and loading it into a target system for analysis or reporting. However, this repetitive process can be time-consuming as it often involves cleaning, joining, filtering, and aggregating data. A...

  This error's name originated from Room 404 At first, I saw error messages as coding villains, ready to ruin my day with red underlines. As soon as I see one, I panic and do everything humanly possible to get rid of it. But now, I view error messages as superheroes here to help me debug my code. The inspiration for this week's post comes from a problem I encountered on the job with code. The Problem Errors were introduced into SQL queries that were needed to generate a crucial report due to updates I made.  However, I didn't know exactly where to start the debugging process, as all the scripts were being executed dynamically.  Whenever one of these queries failed, the entire process would throw a generic error message that did not specify where the error occurred. The brute force approach of combing through dozens of scripts to find a handful of syntactical errors would have been stressful and time-consuming. The Solution Instead of manually looking for the problem, I wa...

A bitcoin spider (it does not exist) Fintech is an area of the financial industry that is constantly evolving and full of excitement and confusion. While you may enjoy the convenience of tapping your card on a point-of-sale terminal, your granny may struggle to adapt to the bank's new app. We can all agree that technology is infiltrating every sector and has led to the emergence of cryptocurrency and autonomous vehicles.  However, with innovation comes the need for regulation, and companies in the United States are now subject to more than 50,000 regulations according to page 6 of  SVB's Breakdown on The State of Fintech . Failure to comply with these regulations can lead to severe penalties, damage to the company's reputation, and even legal action. Coinbase is a prime example of this, as they were fined $50 million for failing to build and maintain a compliance program that could scale with their rapid growth.  Today, risk management is still a highly manual task that ...

 From Numbers to Knowledge  A bird's eye view of the brain with a CPU embedded in it The demand for data analysts and scientists is hotter than the Caribbean sun!  And it's not just because we want to make graphs and charts that look fancy.  No, no, my friend. We need data literacy to survive in the Information Age! Sure, fight or flight responses helped us dodge deadly predators like marsupial lions and saber-tooth tigers back in the day, but now we must use our brains instead of our instincts.  We have to know what the numbers are telling us, and we need to ask the right questions to find the answers we seek. Personally, I've always been a "Why?" kind of person, and it's helped me a lot in my tech career.  Trust me, annoying your parents and coworkers with that one-word question can be a great strategy for finding answers. But it's not just about asking questions, we also need to know our field's jargon and what's expected in each area.  For inst...

 A Guide to Effective Data Storytelling Two Trini Girls Gossiping In the Office Eh girl, lemme tell you dis story bout Maya, dis analyst in de office.   She had to work on some set of data and it was giving everybody rell headache.   Maya say she goh solve it, but as she was going through de numbers,  she start to realize dat someting wasn't right.  Den one night, she hear ah voice telling her dat she eh goh ever figure it out.    Maya get frighten and turn around but ain't see nobody.    Like one ah dem real old-time horror movie, eh!    From dat day, Maya start to say dat de data  was possessed and she went around de office telling everybody. Pat was like "Child, your story is more twisted than the road to Maracas" When a friend tells us a story, we often find ourselves fully engaged and able to recall the details easily. This is because our friends tend to use literary devices such as metaphors and imagery to pique our ...