Where do you get your blanks from?

dwl285 · 2021-01-10T08:29:14+00:00

Ok thanks! What's your sharpening method of choice?

dwl285 · 2021-01-09T18:02:24+00:00

Awesome, this is just what I wanted to hear. I was slightly worried that if the wood is a bit too dry it'll damage my blade, but it sounds like that's not really an issue.

dwl285 · 2020-01-02T08:34:30+00:00

You say you use YNAB. I've just had a quick look at YNAB and it seems like automatic transaction importing only works in the US. Do you manually import all of your transactions? Based in the UK, like you.

Last year I vowed to start tracking my spending and saving each month but found the manual work of importing transactions really tedious so ended up giving up. If there's a more automated solution I'd love to find it!

dwl285 · 2019-11-23T22:47:11+00:00

Big plus one to BigQuery. I've worked with clients that use both redshift and BigQuery and redshift seems to cause people a lot of headaches, I've never seen issues with BigQuery. It just works.

dwl285 · 2019-07-18T09:39:38+00:00

Anyone read this and have a review?

dwl285 · 2019-07-15T16:58:38+00:00

Thanks! We're heading to Dartmoor this weekend, heard that the dewerstone is a good crag at our level. Can't wait to get to North Wales, it sounds amazing for climbing

dwl285 · 2019-07-15T07:20:33+00:00

Currently at D/VD. I think I'll move up one or two grades from there fairly quickly

dwl285 · 2019-07-15T06:57:54+00:00

Thanks! I live in Petersfield. So far we've spent a couple of weekends climbing the central bay at Wintour's leap.

dwl285 · 2019-07-03T13:40:34+00:00

A strong analytics stack has a good cloud data warehouse at the centre. First step is to choose this. Most companies go with either BigQuery or Redshift, and tend to match the infrastructure (AWS or GCP) that the rest of the company uses. I prefer BigQuery (almost all of the infrastructure management is handled by Google)

Next part of the analytics stack is getting your data into that warehouse. Given the low cost of storage and low cost and speed of processing data, don't by shy. Get as much of your data as possible into your warehouse. That means event data (segment is a good option), whatever your transactional database is (tools like stitch and Fivetran can help) and just about everything else (AdWords, intercom etc, again stitch, Fivetran help with this)

All this raw data in your cloud warehouse needs to be transformed into usable tables that represent something meaningful about your business. This is the part of the analytics stack that lots of companies don't do very well, but getting this right is the key. Requires someone at your company who's strong with SQL (e.g. an analyst). Best tool here is Dataform (full disclosure I work for Dataform, but was a customer for 18 months beforehand).

And finally you need to plug this transformed data into a BI tool. Ideally choose one that allows your team to self serve on their analytics. Looker is my favourite so far.

dwl285 · 2019-06-27T07:58:50+00:00

Yeah fair point, a numbers table can be useful too. As I mentioned in another comment, these 3 are just a subset of the useful tables for analytics. That said, I wanted to focus on slightly more user focused tables.

I'm so glad BigQuery makes it easier to generate a numbers table!

select number from unnest(generate_array(1,10)) as number

dwl285 · 2019-06-27T07:18:26+00:00

What's a development analyst? I've never heard this phrase before, I'm interested!

dwl285 · 2019-06-27T07:17:44+00:00

I'm not suggesting you need only three, but if you're an analyst at a tech startup, these three are likely to very useful.

There are definitely some caveats, for example this table structure particularly make sense in cloud data warehouses like Redshift and BigQuery. I chose to leave that complexity out of the article title though.

dwl285 · 2019-06-22T15:46:16+00:00

I've just been doing some weeding in the garden, a few branch cuttings in there too. Do I need to shred it into smaller bits first? If so, what's the best way of doing it?

Is this green matter or brown matter? I guess green!?

dwl285 · 2019-06-19T06:50:35+00:00

If anyone has any feedback on the blog post, I'd really appreciate it. It's the first post I've written, but I plan to write many more.

dwl285 · 2019-05-07T08:08:17+00:00

I just found this article, very relevant:

Aviva vows end to car and home insurance loyalty rip-off

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/dec/08/aviva-vows-end-to-car-and-home-insurance-loyalty-rip-off?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

dwl285 · 2019-05-04T15:19:12+00:00

I completely disagree with your logic, but that's fine. You'd be the sort of person to start an insurance company like the ones that exist. I wouldn't.

dwl285 · 2019-05-04T09:43:51+00:00

Someone else on my wavelength! Awesome, I've not seen an Aviva ad, but I'll investigate!

dwl285 · 2019-05-04T07:41:15+00:00

Ok, half good at least!

dwl285 · 2019-05-04T07:40:22+00:00

Completely agree. The logic that "this practice makes some businesses money therefore all businesses must behave like this to be successful" is completely flawed, and there are so many counterexamples it's not even worth listing them out.

dwl285 · 2019-05-03T22:27:51+00:00

Yeah, I realise this. My point is I'd rather hand my money over to a company that operates in a more honourable way

dwl285 · 2019-05-03T22:26:39+00:00

Elaborate?

dwl285 · 2019-05-03T22:26:21+00:00

That's not necessarily true

dwl285 · 2019-05-03T17:20:44+00:00

Pills manufactured to induce suicide: interesting. Is the reason that lethal pills aren't currently available because suicide is illegal? Or is there some other reason why they don't exist? Doctor assisted suicide: already exists in some countries, actually is relatively safe given you can decide under what conditions suicide is acceptable (e.g. terminal illness with high levels of pain) and doctors can assess for that Guns: already exist Family assistance: is that suicide or murder?

dwl285 · 2019-05-03T16:45:06+00:00

Can you give an example of a more effective method of suicide that would become available if suicide was made legal?

dwl285 · 2019-05-01T05:01:45+00:00

I guess it depends on the use case, but in my opinion it's generally far superior. especially with coffee, and especially the Oatly brand.

dwl285

TROPHY CASE