Keeping Up With Data — Week 11 Reading List
5 minutes for 5 hours’ worth of reading
Flicking through Medium’s recommendations, I came across an article about five books every data scientist should read in 2021 by Arthur Mello. From time to time, I’m asked by aspiring data scientists for recommendations what to read. There are — of course — obvious books making many of the top 10 lists (like The Elements of Statistical Learning) but otherwise I think it’s often influenced by the background and also time entering the field. I will never forget reading Practical Data Science With R back in 2014 or Max Kuhn’s Applied Predictive Modelling or Peter Flach’s Machine Learning even before that.
But let’s not get stuck in the past and see the articles for this week.
- Towards a Data Mesh (part 1) : Data Domains and Teams Topologies. Earlier this months, data mesh thoughts leaders attacked the ‘data peloton’ with a force similar to MvdP taking the stage 5 of Tirreno-Adriatico earlier this week. Many people joined the slack channel, which propelled the topic into the mainstream. Data mesh is a “distributed architecture that attempts to find an ideal balance between centralisation and decentralisation of metadata and data management”. This article adds the team dimension to the data mesh, using team topology to “organise business and technology teams for fast flow”. (Yet Another Blog on Data)
- We Got It Wrong — Data Isn’t About Decision Making: It is often said that data can be used to improve decision-making processes. More and more people are realising that data (and analytics) — by itself — won’t do that. We simply cannot ignore the people in the equation. Design thinking, behaviour change, and nudging are increasingly often mentioned together with data science. I remember that as a young data scientist in a bank my older colleagues compelled me to spend a lot of time with ‘real bankers’ to better understand their work. And that helped me craft the solutions to truly help them. Something that would have been impossible to be done sitting behind my desk at HQ. (In Situ | Antti Rannisto @ Medium)
Only two articles on this week’s list. But sometimes it is important not to read too much and spend more time with the family. Especially when my wife, who started dating me almost 20 years ago (!!!), celebrates her birthday.
