Data Driven

In this Deep Dive, Frank and Andy delve into the world of Data Warehousing, what is it and do they know things? Let's find out!

Frank also shares that he has a new role at Microsoft.

Hello and welcome to data driven,

the podcast where we explore the emerging field of data

science.

We bring the best minds in data,

software, engineering, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Now hear your hosts Frank Lavigna and Andy Leonard.

Hello and welcome back to data driven.

The podcast where we explore the emerging fields of data

science machine learning an artificial intelligence.

If you like to think of data as the new

oil then you could consider us like Car Talk.

However, we can't go on a road trip because of

the Corona virus lock down.

So it's just Andy and I kind of stuck at

home respectively.

And thanks to the Magic of Technology we can be

on the show at the same time.

And, uh, how's it going?

Andy? It's going

well, Frank, how are you doing?

Good, good, uh, you'll

probably hear my kids in the background.

We

will, and you know what Frank,

I think it's fine. You know I'm going to.

I understand why you said the word stuck with you

and I work remotely an awful lot.

We usually record like this.

There's there's less in the background.

It's your place most of the time,

but you have couple of young boys there and you

need to be in the room with them when mom

who's also working from home is you know is doing

some of her work so kudos to you to both

of you for finding a way to manage this.

Everybody's going through these sorts of things and I'm sure

that none of our listeners will mine here in your

sons play in

the background or hopefully won't start fighting so that's Well,

I asked, I asked if they do I think a

lot of folks

can relate though. Yeah, oh absolutely,

absolutely

so. We're recording us on April 16th.

We Speaking of kids, we had your son on which

if the order of recording goes the way I planted

in my head.

That would have been released last week.

And Uh, which I thought was a pretty good,

uh, discussion on. How stem is taught?

How stemmers perceived by quota quote policymakers?

And how the actuality of it is?

And some of the interesting stuff your son is doing

with Raspberry Pi and stuff like that.

Yeah,

I was a I was first I was very proud

of him.

You know the work that he's doing and he's he's

had his his hands in machine learning for really a

couple of three years.

Now I want to say he was 14 and I

came into his room.

You know just checking on say something or something I

saw.

A Mario Brothers playing in the background.

Like what do you think you know he was?

He he had done his school work?

He was home schooled at the time he done his

school work.

So you know what he wants.

But um, later talking to him about it,

he said he actually came and got me and he

said,

OK, dad, it took, you know with I think it

was like 6.

You know neural nodes. Here he was able to,

Mario was able to figure this out and something like

4 hours or something you know later he said I

wonder what it would be if I added a note.

I wonder what that would do to it and I'm

kind of sitting there with my mouth hanging open.

Going show dad more about that nice,

but he's been doing it for awhile.

I know your kids are interested in the same thing.

They're younger Stevie 17 now and you know.

and I know that your sons are coming up in

this.

In this age as well,

they are mentioned Mark Tapatio in that show as he

referred to digital natives.

They are digital natives and yeah,

that comes with some pretty interesting stuff.

So I'm just glad we were able to record that

show as he gets ready for his first sequel Saturday

presentation here on that topic.

So and that's all assuming that we were able to

overcome the technical glitch.

We we learned something, Frank,

I'd learn something. Yeah,

it's not a glitch. If you learn something.

So if if for some reason.

The you know what hit the fan then that episode

will be recorded at a future date,

so we'll see it will,

but we've got. We've got

a great topic today. You and I've been bad this

around I want.

I know it's been several weeks.

It may have been a couple of months.

We've been talking about doing this.

Right absolutely, and part of what motivates this?

An based on the release schedule that I anticipate this

will have already happened.

I'm changing jobs at Microsoft Woo.

At your new job. I will be the data and

the AI technology architect at the Reston MTC or Microsoft

Technology Center,

so congratulations. Thank you very much.

It's an honor to join such a prestigious team.

If you're not familiar with what the MTC is.

MTC is a Microsoft Technology Center.

There is about 80 of them around the world,

and they basically are meant to provide specific experiences.

Ends well as architecture design guidance for customers around the

world and it's an honor to be kind of in

that team.

It's very rarely does an opening happen in an empty,

so when one opened up in my neck of the

Woods is like I have to take it.

I have to at least try.

Right right? So Fortunately I am super excited.

And Uhm, 'cause That's what we say at Microsoft were

super excited and it's a great team.

Great stuff that they do.

They do a lot of work with the community.

They do a lot of work with customers.

It's just an awesome gig.

I'm really looking forward to it and.

Yeah, I'm really excited about

it. Congratulations brother. That's a great thing and I think

you're perfect for that job.

I know, I know, someone else in that job at

an MTC in the northeast.

And it's it's kind of a rare breed of person

that has to walk into that role because.

It optimally you have a smattering of exposure to all

whole slew of enterprise architecture,

an both both you and this other individual that I

know fit that mold.

You've got programming experience, software development experience,

and you also have data experience,

and it's just rare to be good at both of

those things I know,

but I know you're good at it,

and I know my other friend is good at this

as well,

so I just I just think it's going to be

a great fit for you,

Frank. I'm I'm excited, you got

it. Thank you. Thank you very much.

So with that, one of the things that I've been

ramping up on in anticipation for this job or whatever

opportunity I was going to go to next.

I was learning more about the quote Unquote traditional side

of the data world,

which let me move kind of explain my little worldview,

which is twisted and as weird as it may be,

it might actually be right.

I see this alot in my current current or old

roll current as of April 16th.

Role is that we have data in the I cloud

solution architects,

but there's a very clear line of demarcation between the

data scientist.

Part of the data in the icy essays and the

sequel veterans side of things.

So I actually had a call this morning where it

was.

It was very, very much laid bare 'cause we were

talking about that and that there's essentially kind of two

types of data in AI folks at Microsoft for sure,

probably everywhere else, to you have the RDBMS folks.

These folks have been doing sequel since it was aside

based joint venture,

right, right? That's their world.

Ann, you have kind of the big data open source

kind of tooling world,

right? The folks that are more comfortable in spark or

Hadoop or with the crazy statistics and math around machine

learning and AI,

right? You kind of have those two.

Rarely do

the two. Rarely do you

have a person who's. Comfort,

Rible and happy in both.

I am aiming to be happy and comfortable in both.

Obviously I'm more in the data science kind of world.

And part of my part of what I see is

the opportunity in this new role is to grow into

the kind of the sequel.

RDBMS traditional database world. That makes

sense. They are no. It makes perfect sense.

and I mean coming at coming at this from,

you know, we as we shared in each show the

past few days that we've recorded.

We've known each other for like 15 years.

And most of that time you were a professional software

developer.

You are a Microsoft MVP in.

I forget which discipline it was.

Frank, I know it was software development related.

I

think

the world has forgotten that this discipline never existed.

tablet

PC. Tablet PC right? OK and you did an awful

lot in there and I know there's a lot of

people out there working in what that evolved into mobile.

That benefited from the blog post you shared,

solutions. You shared an all of that,

but yeah, that whole mobile thing turned out not to

be such a,

you know, it was a trend it and it evolved.

To what it is now,

and having that experience, I think you're going to find

that that plays well into kind of backfilling like you

said,

or filling this other bucket that you want to go

after,

which is traditional T SQL an.

I know, I know, from experience and dabbling in machine

learning and AI.

I'm on the opposite side of the fence,

although I'm not really that good at,

you know. Let's say like DBA level T SQL,

but I you know I can hold my own in

there,

but if we are. If we're selling tuning performance tuning

to a client.

I may be involved in the project,

but rarely am I the person actually performing the tuning.

There are lots of people out there that we subcontract

as a as a consulting firm,

enterprise data and Analytics. We bring others in who are

better at that much better at that than I am,

and we have people on the team who are much

better than I am as well,

but it's. I think your experiences has his set you

up really well.

To make this transition and it will like everything else

right?

We talked about this in the other shows.

It takes time. And it's frustrating,

but I think you're well positioned to pick up this

skill as fast or faster than almost anyone else I

know just well,

thank you now you know part of it,

I'm not. I'm not completely like naive to the ways

of RDBMS.

I took sequel in college,

database design and college and my professor worked with card

in date.

So you know, like. You know,

I'm only two degrees of Kevin Bacon away.

From the founders of the theory,

so you know that's going for me,

but I never really got into just kind of the

nuts and bolts of it,

and I'm not. I'm not concerned about that.

I'm actually fascinated about it,

because it's just another way to solve the same problem.

Absolutely. Ultimately, at the end of the day,

you're moving bits around, and it's a question.

What's your philosophy? Or obviously,

RDBMS has a philosophy and it you know I'm not

knocking.

I mean, it worked well for 5060 years.

But now we live in a world where there's a

lot more unstructured data.

And how do you deal with that?

And how do you deal with it now that you're

not making assumptions about spinning

disks, right? Right there's a whole.

Kevin hazard.

'cause we haven't hazard.

Yeah who talked about that on our show that yeah

there still leaves it's 2020 and I would say still

most of our code is designed for that age of

the heads picking up seeking a sector an reading data

and then picking up again.

So there's there's a whole new opportunity where obviously relational

databases are going to still matter,

but it's just one of many tool sets.

In fact, one of the things that I learned when

I was doing start up with angelism for Microsoft was.

You know, having debates with startup founders who UR?

I will say I put them in a hipster category,

right? I worked with when you work with startups runs

the gamut between really like I mean like that this

person is going to be the next Steve Jobs to

this person is kind of like I think they're living

in their parents basement,

but rather than seeing unemployed they haven't so somewhere in

the middle you kind of what I have.

The hipster ones where they learned code because of make

the startup.

Now that's not nothing wrong with that,

but do you think that you're an expert in all

things technology because you learn to code?

Right, you know, and then you go to a person

that is supposed to help you take your stuff to

the next level and kind of talk down to them.

So right context this conversation.

So they were basically lamenting the fact that they wanted

to.

They wanted to have the reliability of.

Up an RDBMS, but they wanted to do it in

a note SQL type of environment.

An I was like that's

a fair. You know that's a fair thing to want.

I'm just all cards on the table.

Approaching that, architecturally, that's that's not an unreasonable request.

But unless and until you get into the engineering part

of it.

And that's where you start to see that you just

can't have everything that you want.

I mean, there's no single do it all type application,

everything, every software application ever.

And I'm going to maintain,

probably forever. They're going to be applications.

There's going to be some spot that I define as

a corner.

It's something that the application or server or what have

you doesn't do well.

And what you'll often find is there's some other application

out there that's available,

or some other platform, and it will do that part

well.

But again, that also has its corners,

and So what you're trading is pain.

The nicest way possible. You're picking your picking your poison,

picking your pain. What is it that you want to

fight?

And it depends on. You know.

Relational databases have their pain points.

No sequel. It turns out a lot of companies have

learned this over the past few years.

Also has its pain points as well so.

You can't always get what you want,

but if you try sometimes you might get get what

you need.

Awesome. So, so I

mean part of it is,

you know, sometimes whether it's technology,

anything else, you have, kind of these dueling philosophes an

there is a point where they just won't meet just

because of.

They're they're kind of philosophically opposed an you're right,

you have to kind of pick which one you want

to have over the other.

And there's cause and effect to that.

So with that kind of deep philosophical you were data

philosopher,

so that's good. So I wanted to talk to you

about.

We want to do a deep dive.

It's not officially a deep dive until I have fun

with my soundboard there.

Into data warehousing, what is data warehousing?

Where did it start? I'll channel A little bit of

bojack horseman.

What is data warehousing? What do they know?

Do they know things? Let's find out.

Well, yeah, data

warehousing in my opinion in my experience is really this

idea of of collecting data from all over different places

and placing it into a centralized location.

Now there's some distinctions and there's other scientific answers to

that question,

and you can actually build something that today is not

considered a technically a data warehouse.

You can gather all of the information that spread across

the enterprise in different places.

Into what's now called an operational data store.

Ann, it's not totally unlike a data warehouse.

In fact, I think the Euler diagrams have quite a

bit of overlap for that,

at least if we if we kind of improve or

add to the word data warehouse or the term data

warehouse with relational data warehousing,

there's a lot of overlap between relational data warehousing and

operational data store.

Wanna confuse that really with our listeners?

But I just want to make you aware if you

hear oh DS or DW or EW.

It could be that they're talking about largely the same

thing.

And when you think about like you think about supply

chain management,

which is a topic on everyone's mind these days as

we're talking about the economic impact of the pandemic.

Supply chains are where really where really way more important

than we realize and it's kind of like oxygen or

money.

You don't recognize how important it is until you don't

have enough.

An supply chains are like this and you could think

of a data warehouse.

In that terminology. The analogy holds for quite a bit,

and I'm going. I'm just going to use Walmart and

Amazon as you know,

is kind of examples of this.

They both have these distribution centers and they have these

network set up all over the United States,

probably all over the world and its places where the

goods come from the source and they're trucked into.

You know, they may be collected at other points along

the way.

But they're trucked into these large,

physically large warehouses and then stocked.

And then from there there actually shipped out to in

the case of Amazon.

Usually there handed off to some delivery service.

In the case of Walmart,

they're placed on other Walmart trucks that are shipped to

the stores.

The actual brick and mortar stores and that warehouse in

the middle.

That distribution center. That's what I think of when I

think of data warehouses.

I think of the the electronic equivalent of that because

you know,

there's all of these. You'll see especially at what I

consider an EDW enterprise data warehouse.

You've got a collection of companies that have been acquired

in mergers and acquisitions,

and they're looking at. I want to get all of

their data.

But they have and want to bring that into this

one location,

and that I want it there for a number of

reasons.

But one of the big reasons is so I can

query that data and I can learn how my entire

enterprises performing.

How's it working? And. And in that,

and now if I apply that Walmart Amazon analogy to

that to the data there,

they...

In this Data Point, Frank reflects on the somewhat ironic nature of our tagline (and t-shirts) in light of the negative price of Oil.

This was recorded on Monday, April 20, 2020 and, while oil prices have rebounded somewhat, there are some strange things afoot at the Circle K that is this world.

In this episode, Frank and Andy interview Stephen Leonard, Andy's son, about his upcoming first SQL Saturday Talk, digital natives, engineering and STEM, and old movies like "Aliens" and "the Matrix."

AI Generated Transcript (experimental)

Hello and welcome to data driven,

the podcast where we explore the emerging field of data

science.

We bring the best minds in data,

software, engineering, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Now hear your hosts Frank Lavigna and Andy Leonard.

Hello and welcome back to data driven,

the podcast or we explore the emergent fields of data

science machine learning an artificial intelligence.

If you like to think of data as the new

oil then you can consider us.

Car Talk 'cause we focus on where the rubber meets

the virtual road and with me on this epic journey

road trip down information superhighway.

Although I think we have to be sequestered because of

the pandemic is Andy Leonard,

how's it going? Andy, hey it's going well Frank,

how are you doing, brother?

You know I'm doing OK,

I'm doing OK, we're in lockdown.

I'm in. My wife is actually on an important work

meeting and I have the kids.

In the room with me so you might hear in

a frequent interjection,

but I understand that Speaking of kids,

yeah, we have a very unique guest.

We do, we do have Steven Ray.

My older son is joining us for the first part

of this an we want to talk to him because

at least in this it is first part because he

is about to deliver his very first sequel Saturday presentation.

Yes Sir, very cool. So I know a little bit

about the back story to this so.

Steven, why don't you, uh,

kind of do an intro to yourself.

You're just. Quick bio I know and he probably knows

everything about you,

but most of the rest of his home.

Well, I'm for the uninitiated.

I'm Steven. I'm Andy's son and or as I normally

refer to him.

Dad, I do stuff with small AI and neural Nets.

I also work with Raspberry pis specifically.

Sorry iot devices, specifically Raspberry pie.

Zan, Jetson, Nanos working a little bit less with the

latter.

Recently I've been doing more work with the pies.

And, uh, pretty soon on the 25th I will be

presenting my first sequel Saturday class and I guess I

just got lucky enough to do it on the first

several virtual SQL Saturday. Call it whatever you want,

lock or unlucky based on the world events.

I'll be teaching class on how to install SQL Server

on a Raspberry Pi 3B and I'm working on a

solution for the four as well.

Very call and it's my understanding that you actually you're

actually studying.

Was it telerobotic? Not telerobotics but.

Was it? Does a really cold like $10 word for

it that Angie,

Oh, Mecatronics Mecatronics That's it?

Yes, Sir. Cartoon yes it does.

I'm uh, it's It's, uh,

it's really just all the I believe there are like

12 or 13 official realms of engineering,

or at least the ones that they teach in college.

And it's sort of all of those mixed into one

like hyper focused,

really hard class and I really just chose it because

when I walk into the when I walk into a

room,

if someone has a question,

I just want to be able to answer it.

I want to be sort of the most helpful I

can be and I figure if I'm well enough versed

in.

As much engineering as much as much of the realms

of engineering as I can be,

I figure I can be pretty helpful.

That's pretty, that's the plan.

A chip off the old block there Andy.

Well, he, uh, you know his.

I'll say Frank, he's probably better at it than me

because his mom has a lot of background training in

multitasking type tasks.

She was 911 dispatcher for awhile and to graduate from

that course.

They they literally play five or six conversations at the

same time.

And she had to write down and track all of

the conversations and respond accordingly.

So it makes for a good project manager,

which is awesome because I have exactly zero of those

skills,

so he has. He has more of that than I

do,

but I think he definitely gets his ADHD for me,

which this is Frank. We've talked about this about weaponizing

things that maybe hindrances in some fields an you know

that I hear some of that in Stevie's plans here

because rather than just go after one discipline.

You know, just pick up a discipline of engineering,

mechanical or electronics. You know he likes the idea of

kind of popping between disciplines and.

You know, I, I think that so he's kind of

leveraging the ADHD there.

Yeah, I, I mean I.

I think that if you can,

it's one thing to kind of play to your strengths

and quote Unquote fix your flaws.

But I think there's a whole new level of self

improvement that I've kind of discovered over the last four

years or so.

Is weaponizing your flaws. Yeah,

you know what we talked about this with anti fragile

right?

Antifragility and not seem to loves books on that.

you and I are both huge fans and I'm still

working on getting him to come on the show.

Frank I don't know. I don't know if we're going

to be able to pull that or not,

but I have two goals here.

Is you're well aware one is to make contact with

him and two is to not get blocked on Twitter?

Yes, so he's although if you're for the listener,

if you're not familiar with the lab he's been,

he's been on fire lately with Twitter,

as well as his one of his big sticks is

risk prediction and risk modeling and risk management.

Although he would call it something else,

and he would probably smack me across the face for

calling it risk management.

But honestly, it would be an honor.

Do snack Crossface by to lab in my agree.

Agree yeah, but he's on fire both on Twitter and.

He's making crazy money on this on the fund that

he manage is.

Oh wow, OK, I didn't realize he still managed to

find.

I didn't know either, but somebody reported that he made

either 360%.

A three 3600% or 36 times I don't know whatever

it is,

but he's in March. He made a ridiculous amount of

money,

partly because I think he predicted a lot of the

long tail effects of the Cove in pandemic.

Wow, yeah, if you look at him on Twitter lately,

don't get blocked for him though.

Please yeah, I'll try not true.

I can live without kind of that pseudoscience biohacker knowledge

from his Twitter feed,

but I don't think I could live without to labs

wisdom.

Yes, I'm here. Which again we will share that story

in full detail.

Later, you're laughing. I am laughing now.

We were going through that phase of.

A kind of anger denial and all that.

Now we're kind of laughing at it were accepting.

That's where we have accepted it.

An yeah, so we've gotten over it.

But yes, we need your child.

We have. We have ignored him and we want to

talk about his product now.

You gave him advice that he should Chinese.

He combines the more likely his proposal to speak would

be accepted.

Yeah, and you know this Frank from our relationship and

I've been doing this for.

Along time when I get,

you know, once I got to to be able to

speak,

I started reaching out trying to help others do it.

'cause it was such a rush and I had.

I had a couple of of men tease,

I guess actually present at the pass summit 2019 in

Seattle back in November and you know,

that's just a huge, huge,

great failing and you see the kind of picked up

on that as well.

You heard it when he was talking about his motivation,

part of it as he wants to be able to

help just as much as possible.

But yeah, it came to me.

I don't know ten months a year ago he said

dad,

I want to. I want to do a presentation.

He's been traveling with me to events over half his

life and.

He said, You know, the very first thing I told

him is,

I think that's awesome. You'll do a good job,

but here's what we're not going to do where we're

not going to get you picked because you're my son,

but I'll do the same thing for you.

I do for everyone else,

and I did. That was my next piece of advice.

Was my first real piece of advice.

Was picked something shiny, and by Shawnee I mean you

know something new.

A little edgy an he picked 2.

Uh, an when he first told me about it inside,

I was thinking that's a pretty big bite,

but I didn't share that until just now with him,

but he jumped right in on it.

Franken, I would estimate in the first couple weeks.

He probably put 100 hours on this.

After that. You know he's probably been averaging 50 or

so hours per month or so and I would say

he's got a good solid 400 hours into it before

he got it to work.

And that was a couple months ago.

He actually got it to where he got SQL Server

running on one of our π three is.

So yeah, that was that was a very,

very interesting way that happened to.

I solved it while hanging out I.

It honestly looked like I was building a weapon in

a college that was that was really where it happened

is I was setting in the lobby of the college.

My mother works at. And you know the HD MI

cable was too short sided hanging out of the port

and everything.

But you know I just kind of threw my hands

up and laid back and the desk lady kind of

looks over me like are you OK?

It was it was. It was a very interesting time,

but when I finally got it was just like everything

that I had been waiting for.

Just kind of crashed down on me.

All the money we'd spent on replacing the walls.

I was hitting my head into,

it was just it was.

It was worthwhile. We've been there,

Stevie. I mean, Frank and I both done that an

I've shared this story.

In fact, this is completely unrehearsed

I I've I've shared with people on a bunch of

different times.

When I talk in class is about this.

You know I will. Failure is normal and my demo

for that is I will walk down stairs on a

break and you and your siblings are homeschooled here and

I'll say guess what my code just did and what

is it that you reply in Unison user?

Exactly what you told it to exactly what I told

you right?

Not not what I wanted but exactly what I told

it to.

Yes. But you experienced that.

Go ahead, go ahead now.

You've experienced that, and what I shared with you as

we were going through,

and I do this with everybody that you know,

I have a opportunity and it's truly an opportunity.

It's an honor to mentor anyone when I have that

opportunity to share with them.

Listen failure. You gotta look at failure as the latest

step on the path to success.

And really, what you'll see is when you succeed,

the number of times that you failed will actually kind

of set the bar.

How good it's going to feel.

When you succeed. Was alright,

so yeah, no you were totally correct.

It was. It was the you kind of get to

a point where I explain this to it to my

best friend who was,

you know he works. He helps me work with this

as well.

And I explained it to him and the way I

kind of explained it was I reached a point where

jumping off a Cliff was preferable to continuing to work

on this. And, uh, you know,

I just kept pushing through it.

And finally, once you get to the end,

it's just everything sort of it.

Just kind of collapses on you,

really. It's like being in a building and it's just,

it just feels so good,

just all the all the weeks of hitting your head

against a wall and being angry and not figuring out

not being able to figure out why it's giving you

this error and that error.

And why is this breaking and why I can't get

Docker installed after I've installed it 3 times before on

the same kernel?

You know, it's just. It's all these things over and

over and over again.

Just finally hit you and you just go.

Yes, it's completely foreign to both Frankie.

Now we write code and it just works the first

time,

every time, right? Frank, Oh yeah.

No, it's true. He's never come downstairs.

I've never heard dead come downstairs and go Dang my

code didn't work today.

It's always just man that was perfect.

There's actually a cartoon where it shows the same skeptical

look of a person in front of a computer.

And it says my code didn't work and I don't

know why that was the first captain.

The second one is my code worked the first time

and I don't know why.

It again, if your code works the first time,

then either you forgotten something it didn't work and it's

just not telling you,

or you need to stab yourself with a fork and

wake up,

right, right? Or you kind of like something is bad,

so going something even worse is going to happen.

And what I anticipated, right?

Which I think a lot of folks,

I think you know. I learned this when I was

doing a couple of years ago.

This is back in the Windows 8 days when I

was in evangelism.

Uh, I spoke to a bunch of high school kids

and I kind of did this summer course on writing

apps and stuff like that.

And like I thought, I bombed it the first day.

Like really bad, because it just kept compiler,

kept happening problems and there were some driver issues and

I worked through it an I talked to kind of

like the coordinator with the local high school and he

goes no. That was awesome because a lot of these

kids,

they see how programming is represented on TV and it's.

Everything works the first time and I'm like looked at

him like we both kind of set in Unison.

Nothing ever works the first time,

and if it does, I'm very,

very suspicious. Very sets to write a lot of folks.

They think that they get there,

they get their hands kind of dirty with code or

stem an the first time.

If it doesn't work, they think it's them.

But no. I mean that's frustration is on Fortunately or

unfortunately a large part of engineering.

Right, and that's that's the that's the issue I run

into when when I tell people that I run into

or people that I know that I work with computers

and you know, they tell me stuff like Oh well

that's I'm not smart enough to that.

Or that's too hard. I could never figure that out.

And then there's two kind of groups and that's the

first group is well,

you're so smart an my answer is no,

I just spent a lot of time in it and

the other the other group that I run into is

that like are the people who have seen.

What's the movie called? The oceans,

movies and there like in.

They asked me how nice you know how it feels

when you finally hack the mainframe and get through the

Firewall.

And it's really just like the reality that you run

into when you start getting into doing programming and engineering

of any sorts really,

is that? It's nothing like what it's portrayed in the

movie.

In the movies, in the general consensus of how it

works is nowhere near how it actually works.

Right, right? I mean it it to everybody,

it almost seems. It's almost it's almost synonymous to rocket

science.

I've seen to the at least of the general public

that I've talked to is they think it's some sort

of thing that you have to go to college and

get a degree for, when in reality you can learn

it in your Mother's basement in six months.

Now that's true. Patience is under rated,

I think in our society and this and a lot

of the folks that what differentiates kind of someone who.

Is good at, this is just the patience.

The tenacity. I mean you've demonstrated this.

I think you've internalised it now,

right? But you know a lot of folks,

I think in result of this pandemic are going to

start pondering new careers as they should,

right? You know, just. It makes a lot of sense,

and I think a lot of folks have to realize

that.

Programming is frustration.

Yeah, it's it's definitely. It's definitely not a career that.

4. Uh, what's the word I'm looking for?

Not short minded, but sort of short sighted people who

look for instant gratification,

right? Although I would say that.

As someone who, as someone who has been,

I've never been formally diagnosed with ADHD.

But you know, people close to me have said I'm

high functioning ADHD.

Uh, which is? You know I'm not going to argue

with that,

but there's a lot of folks who were quote a

quote on the spectrum or on a spectrum of some

sort who who do work in Tech.

Which is interesting because I think part of it is

part of ADHD is.

I'm not an expert on this,

but is the ability to focus on one task for

a very extended period of time,

yeah? Yeah, hyperfocus, yeah. So if you are listening to

sorry,

go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say I

completely agree with you.

That's that's really how it is,

at least for me. I'm not sure how it is

for other people with ADHD.

I can't speak for everyone right,

but how it is for me is if there's a

task that I'm just set on completing.

I just do it. I mean,

it's it's hard to really explain.

I just have an idea and I want to do

it and I go and do it,

and I do it until it's done.

That's how it is. Yeah,

I think its tenacity is the real skill tenacity in

patients.

I like that and having an end in mind like

for me when I first learned programming,

this was. Steve, this is like probably Stone Age for

you.

I mean there was no Internet.

I didn't even have a modem,

but she probably even know what a modem is.

Oh, so, So what did you name your Dinosaur?

The one that you wrote to school?

Obviously. I know you had some for cleaning the house

is right,

but what was the name of the one that you

wrote to school back on I we called him Rodney.

I don't know why. Oh OK,

cool because my dad was Rodney Dangerfield then.

Which is probably another name you don't know.

I was gonna say. Yeah,

hold on 1 second.

Look that up in the Wikipedia.

Yeah, it's like it's like the Spiderman movies again where

he's talking about.

There's really, really old movies like back to the future

and aliens,

right, right? Yeah, that was,

uh. Now give me...

In this hybrid show and Data Point, Frank and Andy discuss the ongoing pandemic situation and how to help people laid off.

For the first time in a long time, Frank and Andy are in the same time zone with free time to record a full honest-to-goodness show.

In this Data Point, Andy explains how citizen data science is done in New Zealand after a whale watching tour.

In this Data Point, Andy talks to Reza Rad about the Difinity conference, being an RD, and the SQL Community.

In this Data Point, Andy catches up with Manohar Punna at Difinity 2020 to talk about self-service BI tools.

In this DataPoint, Frank talks with Marck Vaisman, fellow Cloud Solution Architect from DC, about data, the R community in DC, and that "aha moment."

In this Data Point, Frank tells us all about playing with Blockchain in a workshop at the Microsoft internal conference in Seattle.