The Data Binge

Alexandre Delarue, a Sr. Solution Architect on the Data & AI enterprise team at Microsoft, joins us for a deep conversation around unblocking seemingly impossible challenges, as fast as possible, and with as little resources as possible. In the ever evolving world of data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deep learning, quick thinking, robust learning frameworks, and ambitious philosophies are the key to driving a business's competitive edge. Alex shares his secret sauce for high performance problem solving, the "Awesome Minimum".

Hard take-aways about building a high performance mindset:

1. Taking on impossible challenges: You have to understand the problem, the goal, and have enough experience to understand how hard things actually are

2. Do you have the ability to say no to things that are not helping you?

3. Most projects fail or drag because you don't know what to cut out - you must ask yourself, what elements of this are not necessary?

4. Setting the right constraints, aggressive constraints, allows you to find a solution that works, that is creative, that is beautiful, and that is a good solution

5. Getting into new areas, and taking on new challenges, will give you the confidence and ability to constantly take on tougher and tougher challenges in new environments

Alex’s Perspective, when he was founder of his boutique consulting shop, Awesome Minimum, LLC:

“WHY WE EXIST

We believe that long lasting successes start with simple designs.

We believe that great design improves life while respecting the ecosystem.”

You can contact Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/agdelarue/

Twitter: linkedin.com/in/agdelarue

GitHub: https://github.com/agdelarue

Resources:

Ruby on Rail

Please feel free to follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Medium, or at my website: www.derekwesleyrussell.com

Thank you so much for listening!

Closing up an incredible first year at Microsoft, I take some time in this episode to share my top 10 learnings from the year. This is less a tech vignette and more what I've learned from peers, colleagues, leaders, and customers over the past 12 months. This is a great listen if you work in a big organization and strive to further develop your effectiveness with teams, increase your emotional IQ, or better understand your self development journey. Thanks for listening!

Here are the high level Top 10 Learnings:

1) Understand how colleagues are incentivized

2) Schedule "Learning Time"

3) Protecting peoples time, the best gift you can give

4) Being prescriptive, is far more powerful than just educating

5) Be an energy multiplier

6) Power of positivity

7) Your really good at something, focus on what that something is - be clear about strengths & weaknesses

8) The value of asking for help:

9) Have a team of coaches/mentors

10) Lead with empathy, and strive for inclusion

Resources & Links:

Easy Online Learning for daily upskilling:

https://www.edx.org/

www.linkedin.com/learning/

Books:

The Challenger Sale by Matt Dixon & Brent Adamson

Rise of the Robot by Martin Ford

People:

Jen Chason, US CTO for the National Solutions Organization, Microsoft

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferchason/

Please feel free to follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Medium, or at my website: www.derekwesleyrussell.com

Thank you so much for listening!

Connie Fan, a data solution architect at Microsoft, joins us to share her experiences in the computer sciences, her journey as a female immigrant in a male dominated technology industry, and her perspective on the importance of diversity in this new era of AI. Some of the things we underscore in this episode: how homogeneous groups in AI programming are ultimately not good for business and for the world, how businesses should acquire high performance talent, and the importance of growth mindset in a dynamic field that is constantly changing.

Some noteworthy concepts covered:

-Why Artificial Intelligence needs diverse programmers

-Growth mindset: contracting vs expanding personalities

-Perspectives on how businesses can create healthy learning environments

-Predictive analytics success metrics: looking at problems from the lens of an end consumer

Connie has also been instructing big data and data science for UCLA Extension for the last 2.5 years.

You can contact Connie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conniefan1/

Resources:

Diversity Data: https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/reports/hightech/

Books referenced:

Grit by Angela Ducksworth:

Growth Mindset by Carol Dweck:

Please feel free to follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Medium, or at my website: www.derekwesleyrussell.com

Thank you so much for listening!

Shout outs:

*Podcast Photo by Markus Spiske freeforcommercialuse.net from Pexels

*Intro music (beginning only): Orion, by Pedro Santiago

*License

Blockchain as an emerging technology trend has everyone from retail investors, to central banks flocking to gather data on how this can disrupt economies and decentralize currencies, but with all of the crazy behind this new world of digital currency, the wide application of the distributed ledger for use cases in the enterprise are staggering. Join us today with Kevin Leffew, a public sector blockchain SME at Microsoft, to dive into the details about how this technology is being used in businesses today, and what business leaders from operations to finance should be thinking about as they develop their digital strategy and continue to evolve organizations into data driven businesses.

Key talking points:

-Blockchain technology in the enterprise: the value of a secure, shared, and distributable ledger

-Financial services use cases, the smart contract, tokenization of security, and distributed ownership of assets

-Content permanence, authoritative proofs, and the integration of AI

-Decentralized identity, and how this impacts the relevance of recent Facebook privacy issues

-The future of the industry - digital scarcity

Kevin recently contributed to a recent book written by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Ethereum-Building-Smart-Contracts/dp/1491971940

Here is how you can reach Kevin:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/kleffew94

GitHub: https://github.com/keleffew

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinleffew/

Email: [email protected]

Please feel free to follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Medium, or at my website: www.derekwesleyrussell.com

Thank you so much for listening!

Shout outs:

*Podcast Photo by Markus Spiske freeforcommercialuse.net from Pexels

*Intro music (beginning only): Orion, by Pedro Santiago

*License

With all the hype and buzz around machine cognition and artificial intelligence (AI), it's hard for business leaders to decide how to adopt AI, let alone plan to embrace it through technological and cultural change within the business. In this episode of The Data Binge Podcast,  Tony Abell, Data Solutions Architect for Microsoft, joins us to answer the tough questions around AI and what businesses should really be looking for as they prepare their digital strategies for a new era of technology.

Some enlightening moments in the conversation:

-AI adoption isn't happening at rates as alarming as executives and shareholders think - most businesses aren't ready…find out why from Tony

-skills, hardware, and software are not the biggest limitations with adopting an AI driven business - its the company culture

-grass roots change usually never works in technology adoption, there needs to a connection in interests from both the doers at the bottom who are getting things done, and the decision makers at the top

-business leaders should look more into how they incentivize around performance and change, versus doing what has always been done to surpass challenges

You can contact or follow Tony Abell at Twitter or LinkedIn

Resources:

Gartner Hype Cycle for emerging technologies: https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/top-trends-in-the-gartner-hype-cycle-for-emerging-technologies-2017/

MIT Sloan, BCG survey: https://www.bcg.com/publications/2017/strategy-technology-digital-is-your-business-ready-artificial-intelligence.aspx

Please feel free to follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Medium, or at my website: www.derekwesleyrussell.com

Thank you so much for listening!

Shout outs:

*Podcast Photo by Markus Spiske freeforcommercialuse.net from Pexels

*Intro music (beginning only): Orion, by Pedro Santiago 

*License

"As you're walking around, you're fighting off all kinds of illnesses and I think security is that way, that you probably don't even realize when people are improperly using your networks, information, or stealing data"  - Matt Hollingsworth on data security and big businesses

In this episode of The Data Binge Podcast, Matt Hollingsworth joins us to share his experiences with data security, what businesses should be thinking about when protecting themselves, and the perspectives all the way through executive leadership that will help avoid future breaches.  Matt is currently a Solution Architect on the Data & AI team at Microsoft.

Surprisingly, this is not a very technical conversation!

Take-aways on how to frame up data security:

-Make sure you have a back-up recovery strategy

-Look at security from an attack vector standpoint; develop threat models

-Have adequate audit policies

-Don't rely on one thing, diversify the incentives for how you store and protect your data (build a castle wall too big, and people will look for other ways in)

Check out Matt's referral for an awesome book that got him interested on the topic of security and hacking: "The Cuckoos Egg" https://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionage/dp/1416507787

You can contact or follow Matt on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthol/

Please feel free to follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Medium, or at my website: www.derekwesleyrussell.com

Thank you so much for listening!

Shout outs:

*Podcast Photo by Markus Spiske freeforcommercialuse.net from Pexels

*Intro music (beginning only): Orion, by Pedro Santiago 

*License 

"Scaling, we're all trying to do more with less, and do you really want your staff spending all this time managing things like infrastructure, managing assets that are depreciating…let's take security alone, maybe you have 10 full time security people, when you go to a cloud solution like Azure, you have thousands of security people, that is their full time job - to find vulnerabilities…you just can't have these kinds of resources when you own your own company as you can in Azure" - Kirby on why businesses should not manage their own data infrastructure

Kirby Repko, Solution Architect for Microsoft's enterprise data & AI solution area, joins us on the podcast today to share his experiences and learnings on how businesses should be storing their data, specifically getting deep on platform as a service (PaaS) - managed databases.

Notable take-aways:

-What CIO's and CEO's really care about when it comes to how the business manages their data

-The differences between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS

-Why businesses should be focusing on proprietary functions, not managing data centers

-Why the data ecosystem is integral to how a business runs AI and machine learning workloads

-A message for data base architects, and how their roles are changing with the intelligent cloud

-Baby steps: what businesses should be doing today to digitally transform

You can contact or follow Kirby on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirbybrooksrepko/

Kirby also has an awesome Youtube channel with over 400 subscribers called SQLTalk: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6PtJ7FG2eMmQ5FW9e60ClQ

Please feel free to follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Medium, or at my website: www.derekwesleyrussell.com

Thank you so much for listening!

Shout outs:

*Podcast Photo by Markus Spiske freeforcommercialuse.net from Pexels

*Intro music (beginning only): Orion, by Pedro Santiago 

*License 

Derek Heckemeyer, Solution Specialist for Microsoft's enterprise data & AI solution area, joins us on the podcast today to share his thoughts on on how the landscape of how data is stored and utilized in big business, is fundamentally changing. Derek H. makes comments about the critical nature of how Microsoft's cloud, Azure, is allowing businesses to digitally transform, and why many customers are moving to an intelligent cloud intelligent edge mindset.  

-Some notable items covered in the conversation also include:  

-The new Microsoft, and notable changes in the business of big tech 

-Why customers should and are moving their data into the cloud 

-On premises data bases, and the cultural/technical shift into the Azure cloud 

-Scaling across a data infrastructure with AI driven workloads that accelerate the trajectory of multi-domain customer success 

-Facilitating an organization's IT and line of business to work together for a consolidated digital strategy  

You can contact or follow Derek H. on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekheckemeyer/ 

Please feel free to follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Medium, or at my website: www.derekwesleyrussell.com  

Thank you for listening! 

Shoutouts: 

*Podcast Photo by Markus Spiske freeforcommercialuse.net from Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/green-water-fountain-225769/ 

*Intro music (beginning only): Orion, by Pedro Santiago - http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Pedro_Santiago/Orion/ 

-license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/