So. Hey. I got this spiffy new blog. You’re probably wondering what I’m planning on doing with it. (Assuming anyone’s reading at this point, since I haven’t actually said anything worth reading yet.)

I had a blog several years back called the Data Integration Blog, and a couple years back called the Big Data Blog, but those were company blogs and in one case, I switched companies, and in the other case, the company switched me. I like blogging, so, I thought I’d give it another shot. But this time, the blog is mine. So, while I’m highly likely to talk about stuff related to my work at Actian, if I switch companies, or the company changes directions, no skin off my blog. I get to keep this one.

The URL is sort of a clue that I might be discussing some big data related things and stuff. My job title these days is Hadoop and Analytics Evangelist, so I’m bound to talk about, I don’t know, maybe Hadoop and data analytics at some point. My background is in ETL and Data Quality. I’ve spent years of my life wrestling unruly, unstructured, stubborn data into neat little rows and columns, making various applications work and play well with others, and writing software that helps with that sort of thing, so I’ll probably chat about that a bit.

Since, I am a hugely nerdy geek, various pop culture references showing up would not be inconceivable. (You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.) (Well, that didn’t take long.)

Aside from that, we’ll just see where this thing takes me. I’m going to post hopefully once a week to once every two weeks if life gets too crazy.

Beyond that, I’ve got no solid plans. My brain just gets really full of data technology related thoughts, and my husband’s eyes glaze over if I talk about this stuff with him, and forget parties. At parties, no one wants to talk the intricacies of the growing Hadoop ecosystem, whether Spark is going to totally replace MapReduce, or whether linear regression is a useful algorithm in real business cases. But some folks actually do enjoy a good discussion on when sampling doesn’t make sense, and whether a data lake concept is more like a cesspool without some data quality processes in place, or if data warehouses have a future. I figure, here, on the wide world of the internet, my people can find me.

So, if you want to hang out with me and talk shop, let’s do it.

I’m in.

Paige