[Coté Memo #021] Data MQs, Giving Feedback, Quantified Dogs

Aug 15, 2014

Meta-data

Hello again, welcome to #21. Today we have 30 subscribers, so we're +/-0. I'd love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io.

See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote.

Tech & Work World

Stats gorging

I've been trying to figure out what to do with all these Twitter stats. Got any ideas?

Connected Cultures and Oblique Strategies is finally back

Suggested title: "Quantified Dogs & Rocket Donkeys & Cyborg Vagina & 'I'm kind of a big deal'"

We've been on hiatus in one of the more fun podcasts I do. But things have calmed down with Chris' schedule, so we're back to recording. We even have the next recording scheduled!

All that data

Someone on the Enterprise Irregulars list pointed out the newest Magic Quadrant on data warehouses. (See the related "Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms" MQ here, after you lead-gen yourself to Tableau)

It mashes together "traditional" DW with things like Hadoop. This has been unheard for awhile, so it's kind of an exciting moment...if you're someone like me who once spent a quarter infinitely detailing the Business Intelligence and Big Data market.

Too bad I can't share my totally awesome slide deck with you - it's just as well, it would cause your head to ssplode.

Feedback

One of my friend's mother wrote a book about feedback that I've been enjoying: The Feedback Imperative: How to Give Everyday Feedback to Speed Up Your Team's Success. I like how it opens up and essentially says managers are to blame. Who wouldn't like a book that tells managers they're doing it wrong?

Here's an especially fun definition of feedback:

Feedback is information from past action that is used to guide future action. The movement of the information from past to future action is called a feedback loop.

The rest of the book is not really written that Zen-ishly an is an extremely easy read.

As a manager who's only learned on the job (is anyone ever really trained on how to be a manager?) I'm finding this book really useful. It reminds me of some of the less stratospheric stuff in The Hard Things About Hard Things (like, you should train people, dummy!).

VMworld

The giant infrastructure software conference VMworld is about a week away. I'd expect to see a few mildly interesting announcements next week as rivals rush to get news out and then a slew of stuff during VMworld.

I'll be at the conference Monday to Wednesday, it should be fun. We're hosting a 451 breakfast on Wednesday morning that I could probably get you into if you were interested. It's supposed to be 50-100 people or something like that.

Refresh refresh

I tried out the Refresh app again today. It's actually pretty interesting and helpful.

Fun & IRL

No fun today, just work.

Follow-up

It was suggested I could should add a tag-line to this: "I never met a data I didn't like."

I'll leave with that.