Issue 20 - Not evenly distributed
How to work with data people?
Recently a data scientist teammate went through designing a customer lifetime model.
This is not new, even if Netflix and Google paired research on this recently. But instead of the de facto machine learning way, he went for statistics.
That was not the first time I see such initiative, but that one particularly was a great call!
His talk showed how statistics can a great fit for such modelisation. It was about beta distributions and corresponding workaround.
Beyond the fact that machine learning isn't the only way, the fact that distribution modeling can fit and explain reality behaviors was a brain changer on some thoughts I had recently...
We've all been happy at some point. Wealth is not balanced, but it's a reality for many people. There are already climate resilient towns and communities. There are good politicians. There is peace almost everywhere. There are people caring of each other.
There are good initiatives to make the world a better place.
In some place futur is already here.
It's just not evenly distributed.1
The scale or our world require thinking in guess estimates. Instead of craving for big changes - with a wave of a magic hand - we should move our distribution cursor toward an optimal solution. Not the solution. As it doesn't really exist.
There will be always wars, famines, poverty, atrocities, etc... but maybe less. When we compare to the past, we already see we moved the distribution.
There are no much big wars during for decades. The vast majority of humanity as decent lifestyles. We get ride of so many diseases. etc… 2
What if we move the distribution by a percent ? What if we drive people and societies to fit the distribution? To train everyone looking for their local optimum, living in a global maximum?
📡 Expected Contents
What the heck is data mesh
I recently heard a lot about this concept and how it has been used to transform data teams toward a service oriented architecture (SOA).
If like me you're a bit late on that "data mesh" think, this essay is a great summary about the four pillars behind this new paradigm.
A new browser
This is something we don't think about quite often. Our web browser.
I was a great user of Google Chrome for years.
Now I'm all-in on Arc.
This new browser - still based on Chromium - is the best software I ever used for a long time.
Built by ex-Instagram engineers, former Heads of Design at Tesla and Medium, multiple Google Chrome alums, a founding engineer of Amazon S3, alumni from Snap, Slack and Pinterest, etc... this new browser It's dead simple, but come with great feature (that Easel thing is soooo great 👀)
Only on MacOS for the moment, but Windows support coming soon !
I you only have to try one tool on this last month: you know where to click 👇
Poor man’s data lake
What a great post from the Dagster team (Sandy Ryza is going to be my legend) !
Even if it's not something you would deploy in your company, that post explains how we can build a data-lake(house) with only DuckDB and Dagster framework.
The war is clearly open between orchestrator tools3 and Dagster's features a definitely rising the whole field.
Rest of the world (actually a majority)
Looking at the audience of this newsletter, it's without surprise that the majority of subscribers are European or American people.
Still, I know some of you come from Asia and especially India.
In Occident we always talk about big tech companies controlling our lifes. Thinking they are the actual same ones all over the world.
But that's partially true.
Many Indians rely on products, food, and services from the vast array of companies controlled by or partnered with Mukesh Ambani. A billionaire among India’s richest men, and so the world.
Occident relying on Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, etc... and Indians depending on products and services supervised by one billionaire look likes two sides of the same coin...
This great scrollytelling piece go through all the products and services supporting the lifestyle of many Indians today. A great piece to get enlighted about the most populous country in the world !
📰 The Blog Post
The go-to guide for how to work with data people.
Definitely something I wish to have written earlier!
For Christmas I featured this one within the great Blef's idea : The Advent of Data.
Every day of December, a new data article will be released 🎁
🎨 Beyond The Bracket
You probably already came across a weird shaped public infrastructure. Either to sit down and rest or just bugged on an unusual shape.
Like those spikes on flat zones, close to banks or institutions, to prevent the homeless from settling...
This satirical project - Archisuits by Sarah Ross - catch perfectly that non-sense in the way architecture is sometimes done in public spaces.
It reminds us how subtle changes in our environment can improve our lifestyles. How much design is important, all the more when touching public infrastructure that sit here for decades. Influencing daily habits of millions, routes, businesses, culture.
Speaking about habits and environments: I recently got a great keyboard and a proper 27" screen to work at home and it changed so much my level tiredness by the end of day. Now, I'm definitely looking for a great chair 👀 (if you have a good one, please reach out to me 🙏).
This was the last post of 2022. Seems like this whole year passed in a blink.
Absolutely continuing this newsletter in 2023 looking how much constant you're reading it. It personally bring me so much happiness and space to mature things that matter to me. I couldn't stop writing on this monthly basis.
Hope you're doing well. Wish you have great time by the end of the year !
See you in 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣3️⃣ 🎉