In This Space – 2019

There are a few more experiments coming to christopherberry.ca for 2019.

The optimization objective of this set of activities is the same that it was a decade ago: to become a better communicator.

I’ve shared a set of new challenges for the data scientist in the January-February issue of Analytics Magazine. I’ll spend part of this year expanding on some of the challenges that I’m running into as they emerge, and leaving a metatag for them.

I’ll be posting more series. Last year, in response to a massive, dramatic, thread on slack, I wrote a five part series on the basics of organizing for data science. People find these useful years after they’re posted. (It’s been seven years since I answered the question Who’s Downvoting You On Reddit – and it still reaches a generalist audience).

I’ll be posting fewer stand-alone pieces. In 2017, I struggled mightily with Total Addressable Market assumptions, Total Addressable Market estimations, before finally making peace with it. In retrospect, they could have been a series. In 2018, I struggled with the mystery and heuristics of integrity when confronted with the unpersuadable. This struggle produced four stand alone pieces – Deciding the Kind of Leader You Want To Be, Ikigai, Why Teams, and culminating in the romp If Novels Were Written Like Software. These posts enabled a lot of conversations and a lot of subsequent writing throughout 2018, which has resulted in a bunch of heuristic changes. Individually though, there is no easy thread to follow the ball.

I’ll be expanding on more heuristics. Sometimes I blog so that I don’t have to repeat a heuristic. For instance: the definition of an insight, the urgency bias, data driven culture and brand keys, the importance of a single dependent variable at a time, the listicle, managing yourself through the hype cycle, the importance of simulation – especially with segmentation, and deep learning / narrow machine intelligence.

I’ll be experimenting with a higher posting frequency, with a lower word count, and a higher number of hand drawn images.

I’ll continue to share travel notes. I’ve never claimed that these are fun to read, merely that they should be useful. I’ve written notes for Canadians on visiting Mexico City, Miraflores, and Cusco. Previous notes on visiting Koh Tao,Buenos Aires, and Lisbon have likely aged well.

Those are the experiments for 2019.