Oversimplified: Volume 121
Tools I'm loving right now, the obvious meaning of life, and NLP + Analytics
Hey there 👋
It’s been a few weeks! Things have been hectic with travel, and to be honest, I’m still figuring out how to manage time for this newsletter efficiently with the new gig. I feel like I’m getting the hang of it now though. Expect more from me moving forward.
If you’re new around these parts, Oversimplified is a digest of the best links I stumble upon each week. If you have any thoughts or recommendations just hit reply, I’d love to hear them.
✍️ NLP and Self-Serve Analytics
Is GPT-3 going to take over the analytics landscape? I think there’s a place for NLP and ways it can help us, but it’s not a silver bullet by any means.
✍️ Tools I’m Loving Right Now
Just a list of all the software in my personal and professional stack that I really enjoy using right now. Steal one or two tools from this and try them out.
📚 The Ridiculously Obvious Meaning of Life
Lots of hard-hitting questions: “Why would a culture that cannot find value in individual moments want to live as long as possible?”
📚 The ROI of Data Work
The visualizations in this post are quite excellent. I tend to agree with the takeaway about finding ways to scale your work for greater impact. Applies to all sorts of data roles from engineers to product managers.
📚 The Monstrosity Email Has Become
For some reason I’ve never understood, email is fascinating to me. This post takes a stroll through the history of the development of email and calls out some of the baggage that we live with today.
📚 The Omicron situation
This newsletter rarely wades into the realm of news and current events, but I really enjoyed how this article clearly laid out “what we know now” for the most recent covid-related turn of events.
📚 42 Things I Learned Building a Production Database
Lots of great advice in this listicle, especially applicable for rolling out new infra or systems within a larger organization.
🔗 128 Things About the City
Another listicle for the road. If you’ve lived in a city for an extended period of time, you’ll definitely recognize at least a handful of these things and might even trigger some fond memories.
Food for Thought
“For a long time I knelt there, holding her hand… Afterwards I stood by the open window and looked through the crevice of the curtain. The shouts, laughter, and cries of the two children had come up into the chamber from the open air, making a strange contrast with the death-bed scene. And now, through the crevice of the curtain, I saw my little Una of the golden locks, looking very beautiful, and so full of spirit and life that she was life itself. And then I looked at my poor dying mother, and seemed to see the whole of human existence at once, standing in the dusty midst of it. Oh, what a mockery, if what I saw were all, — let the interval between extreme youth and dying age be filled up with what happiness it might!” — Nathaniel Hawthorne
Until next time
As always, if you're enjoying Oversimplified, I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two. If anything stood out, whether good or bad, I would love to hear about it. Reply to this email or tweet at me and let’s chat.
Until next time,
Conor