A Lifetime of Loving Data
Dear Data,
As you know, I’ve always been a “numbers guy”. I was a math award winner, calculus book prize champion, and national merit scholar based on you! My second master’s degree was all about you with an engineering bias and my thesis was an operations research dissertation combining technology with finance – you dominated! Basically, you and I have been best friends for over 50 years. Thank you for always being there for me!
I started falling for you early on; all my sporting activities seemed to focus on you! Baseball, basketball, football, lacrosse, golf, and tennis all required scoring and averages and specific analytics to compare favorite players and affirm role models. Points per game, yard per carry, birdies, shot accuracy, and scoring mechanics all brought me closer to you.
Then I fell deeper in love with you during my engineering education and early career. To become a nationally certified Professional Engineer, I needed to know everything about you, and thankfully, you were up to the task, as open and honest as ever.
As my business career progressed, not only have you become more important to me, but you’re one of the most valuable assets to all of my customers! I now leverage you to produce more analytics & insights, visualization, and dashboards that leverage machine learning, the Internet of things, and real-time advanced algorithms. How I love to help enterprises unlock your power and drive massive digital transformations with enterprise data platforms where you are the star!
I’ve come to rely on you for almost everything every day. From GPS to GPA, from rotten tomato scores to buyer’s guides, from daily nutrition to nightly REM tracking, you are an invaluable partner in every moment of my life. You have been a steadfast element in my adventures and learnings and an ever-present pi in my life cycles.
As CEO of Pythian, I get to say “Love Your Data” every day! I get to embrace and talk about you with customers worldwide. I get to see your real power exposed by clever data scientists and engineers – wow!
Thank you, data, for being straight and true, explicitly rational, and while sometimes odd or even, always there for me. Thank you for bringing the wonderment of chaos theory to the universe and for being the basis of explaining everything. And thank you for remaining constant in an ever-changing world.
Your friend for life,
Keith
#loveyourdata
