OA Digest Year in Review: How our favorite community content stacked up in 2022 | Census
Parker RogersDecember 20, 2022
Parker is a data community advocate at Census with a background in data analytics. He's interested in finding the best and most efficient ways to make use of data, and help other data folks in the community grow their careers. Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
Throughout 2022, I shared 125 resources in the OA Digest Newsletter. 🤯 These resources came in various forms (blogs, videos, podcasts, events, etc.), but they came together to serve a single purpose: Help data professionals gain practical knowledge to level up their careers. 📈
To wrap up the year, (Please! Not another Spotify pun!) I wanted to highlight the 10 most popular resources from all of my newsletters.
So, without further ado, thanks for being an OA Digest reader, and enjoy the top 10 (in no particular order). 👇
Whether you’re a SQL veteran or a beginner, it’s always nice to have a SQL cheat sheet on hand. This blog is your ticket to remembering all the basic SQL syntax and semantics. Hopefully, it saves you a few google searches!
Josh has been building CLV models for over a decade. Not only does he share the templated SQL and jinja code, but he carefully explains the logic behind it all. Give this a read If you’re looking to up your SQL knowledge or gain a better understanding of CLV modeling.
There’s nothing worse than having to write long, complex queries to answer simple questions. Sure, sometimes it’s unavoidable, but other times you simply need to leverage some handy-dandy, pre-built SQL functions.
In this article, Ahmed shows you how to substitute subqueries and self-joins with simple SQL functions like CONCAT.
Even if your responsibilities fall outside the realm of A/B testing, I highly recommend giving Adam’s blog a read. You can learn from his disciplined planning and execution process, as well as his high-quality SQL queries, then apply them to a wide variety of SQL projects. In this blog, Adam shares:
🪄 A practical example of A/B testing
🪄 Quality SQL queries for joining, de-duping, and safeguarding user-level tables
🪄 How to accurately calculate summary metrics accurately (hint: double-check your denominators 😉)
Emily is a two-pronged professional, dabbling in both data and product. In this blog, she shares her best practices for developing self-service data tools for stakeholders (including two best practices I, personally, hadn't previously considered):
Create an internal marketing plan. This will help your stakeholders a) know that the tool exists and b) know how to use it.
Plan for customer support. Set up a process in order for stakeholders to easily contact you, so your team will solve their issues in a timely manner.
You can always count on at least one SQL tutorial in every OA Digest newsletter. You know those 50+ line SQL queries you used to write? But then, one day, "poof" 🪄 you learn about a function that solves it in 4? In this blog, Madison shares the common SQL functions she uses to solve complex problems.
Bonus: SQL code is included in each example so you can not only learn, but also apply them yourself in a snap. 👌
This is the first installment of Ergest’s workshop series. In it, Ergest gets hands-on with SQL and shares key principles to help you take your SQL skill from intermediate to advanced. More specifically, he teaches:
🎯 Query composition patterns - How to make your complex queries shorter, more legible, and more performant
🎯 Query maintainability patterns - Constructing CTEs that can be reused. In software engineering, it's called the DRY principle (don't repeat yourself)
🎯 Query robustness patterns - Constructing queries that don't break when the underlying data changes in unpredictable ways
🎯 Query performance patterns - Make your queries faster (and cheaper) regardless of the specific database you’re using.
If you work with event data (tracking, attribution, etc.), you’ve seen how disorganized, inaccurate, and useless it can be in the absence of a well-executed plan. Timo’s been building tracking plans for 10+ years, and he recently released this free 1-hour course on how to develop, manage, and implement a good tracking plan.
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Bonus: Timo is somewhat of a flowchart expert. It’s fascinating. He visualizes the information as fast as he speaks it. 😂
It’s particularly tedious because the decay calculation must reference multiple rows from the same table, and an inefficient query might crash your warehouse 💥. Some participants leveraged window functions, others used joins, and Felipe chose Tabular JavaScript UDFs.
If you come across a similar problem, Tabular JavaScript UDFs might be your best option!
Yes, another Ergest workshop! And if your data profession has anything to do with data modeling – or if you simply want a high-level overview from an industry expert like Ergest – I strongly recommend giving it a watch.
You’ll learn:
🎯 Data modeling 101: What is it? Why's it so important?
🎯 Top-down vs bottom-up data modeling: Which one is best for the current state of your business?
🎯 Overview + pros & cons of popular physical data modeling types (One Big Table, Kimball Dimensional Modeling AKA Star Schema, Relational Modeling, Activity Stream, etc.)
2022 was a great year for data practitioners. And as the industry continues to boom in 2023, we're sure to see even more great content from data folks!
