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Staff Data Scientist: Comments on Will Larson's Staff Engineer Book

May 27, 2022 · 11 min read · data science job titles management ·

I recently read Will Larson's excellent book Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track. Larson covers the individual contributor (IC, not management) roles that software engineers fill after they are promoted past Senior Software Engineer, with titles like Staff and Principal ("Staff-plus"). In …

A/B Testing and Product Ratings, Part 2: Multiple Ratings

May 23, 2022 · 3 min read · data science analytics business statistics a/b testing ·

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Second, your A/B test split users, but you’re measuring ratings, which are per-item. Some customers will buy multiple pairs of shoes, and most likely will either rate all of them or none of them. Does this fact affect how confident you can be at the end of the experiment? Randomization Unit Mis-Match A/B tests are …

A/B Testing and Product Ratings, Part 1: Delays and Bias

May 22, 2022 · 7 min read · data science analytics business statistics a/b testing ·

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Suppose you’re a data scientist at an e-commerce web site that sells shoes, responsible for supporting A/B tests. Many A/B tests are easy, and there are a number of companies that sell tools that make the easy cases as simple as clicking a few buttons and looking at pretty graphs. But A/B tests can get statistically …

New Publications and Upcoming Talks

Sep 4, 2018 · 1 min read · algorithms conferences data science machine learning meetup software architecture ·

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Just a quick post here to note a few professional accomplishments: I just added a new publication to my vita -- a peer-reviewed conference proceeedings article about abstractions for building repeated, related versions of similar predictive models. Check out some longer thoughts on Medium, or read the full article. …

On moving my blog from Wordpress to Blogdown

Mar 11, 2018 · 3 min read · meta R ·

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This is my first new post on harlan.harris.name for a while. The occasion is a change of scenery. For about 10 years, my primary blog has been on WordPress, more recently supplemented by Medium. But WordPress and Medium are limited for technical writing, and the trend among data people recently has been to publish …

On How and When to Teach Layers of Abstraction in Programming

Oct 5, 2017 · 5 min read · programming R teaching computer science ·

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This post was originally published on Medium There’s recently been some interesting opinionated writing in the R statistical programming community about how and when to teach the abstracted, easy-to-use approaches to solving problems, versus the underlying nitty-gritty. David Robinson, Data Scientist at Stack Overflow, …

A few things I learned from two small Data Science conferences

Jul 16, 2017 · 5 min read · data science machine learning conferences ·

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This post was originally published on Medium I recently attended two small conferences — the ISBIS (International Society for Business and Industrial Statistics) 2017 conference, held at IBM Research in Westchester County, and the Domino Data Lab Popup, held in West SoHo. I was invited to speak at ISBIS (slides here, …

What do Data Scientists mean by “Scaling”?

Jun 9, 2017 · 7 min read · machine learning data science scaling software architecture ·

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This post was originally published on Medium Occasionally when chatting with other data scientists, especially with others who are interested in integrating predictive models into production software system, the word “scaling” comes up. Not this. Although some West Coast data scientists are into this kind of scaling …

Conference Blogging INFORMS Analytics 2017

Apr 9, 2017 · 3 min read · data science conferences analytics operations research ·

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This post was originally published on Medium A particularly good way to get a little more out of professional conferences is to blog about your experiences, I think. It makes you focus your thoughts on things like “what’s the big take-away here,” and “what should I be asking people in the hallways?” Rather than just …

Transparency, Trust, and Proprietary Predictive Analytics

Feb 27, 2017 · 9 min read · data science machine learning algorithms ethics ·

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This post was originally published on Medium A particularly good talk at Strata NY last year was by Brett Goldstein, former CIO of Chicago, who talked about accountability and transparency in predictive models that affect people’s lives. This struck a strong chord with me, so I wanted to take some time to write down …