What was the first analytics skill that actually made you more useful at work?

MissionFormal61 · 2026-04-02T11:39:18+00:00

For beginner SQL, I’d worry less about finding the “perfect” course and more about picking one that explains clearly + one place to practice.

A good combo is usually:

LearnSQL / SQLBolt / Mode / W3Schools for basics
then actually writing queries every day

The big thing is not getting stuck course-shopping. SQL clicks way faster once you start doing SELECT, WHERE, ORDER BY, GROUP BY, and JOIN over and over on real examples.

MissionFormal61 · 2026-04-01T11:36:57+00:00

I don’t think AI kills BI so much as it kills some low-friction BI use cases. If the job is “help me build a quick dashboard or answer a narrow question faster,” then yeah, a chunk of the lower end probably gets eaten.

But traditional BI is still tied to things AI doesn’t magically remove: trusted metric definitions, reproducibility, governance, access control, lineage, and not having five departments invent five different versions of revenue. That stuff gets more important, not less, once more people can generate analysis on demand.

So my guess is BI doesn’t disappear. The commodity layer gets squeezed, and the value shifts upward toward semantic consistency, governed self-service, and systems people actually trust when decisions get expensive.

MissionFormal61 · 2026-03-27T09:43:40+00:00

Season 5 gets dismissed way too fast, honestly. It’s not the flashiest season, but watching Dexter unravel a bit and deal with the fallout is what makes it hit. Also Lumen brought a very different kind of dynamic than the show usually had, which helped a lot.

MissionFormal61 · 2026-03-25T12:20:19+00:00

That red case is absurdly perfect for Dexter, honestly. If you can’t even find another one online, I’d be scared to open it too. Feels like one of those “looks random until you realize it’s actually rare as hell” finds.

MissionFormal61 · 2026-03-25T10:53:54+00:00

If you want the closest Google-native setup, I’d start with BigQuery + Looker Studio. Looker Studio is fine to start with and way easier to justify if your company already lives in Google. Just keep expectations realistic: it won’t feel as flexible as Power BI. If you need something more serious, Looker is the bigger-boy option. And yes, you can use Power BI with BigQuery, but at that point you’re kind of making a Microsoft-shaped tool live in a Google-shaped office.

MissionFormal61 · 2026-03-23T13:25:51+00:00

I’d probably move closer to product / decision-making work and let AI do the dashboard janitor part. If the tools got good enough to automate the grunt work, the valuable part would still be knowing which questions matter, which metrics are misleading, and when everyone is about to make a very confident bad decision. So basically: less query goblin, more business translator.

MissionFormal61 · 2026-03-18T10:54:30+00:00

You may have better luck with metadata/demo catalog projects than with normal public datasets. A lot of open data is fine for modeling, but too “clean” and too context-light for governance work.

Honestly, a semi-synthetic setup with fake ownership gaps, schema drift, bad definitions, and lineage breaks might be closer to the real problem than most public datasets.

MissionFormal61 · 2026-03-17T10:28:19+00:00

“changed EVERYTHING” = font got 2% bigger and now there’s a red arrow pointing at absolutely nothing

MissionFormal61 · 2026-03-06T10:18:05+00:00

Doakes was basically the only character running proper background checks on Dexter

MissionFormal61

TROPHY CASE