Nobody warns you about this part. You learn joins, you learn aggregation, you land a job, and then you discover that the field called district contains “Pune”, “pune”, ” Pune “, “PUNE”, “Pune ” and “Punr”. And a number. And, for reasons nobody can explain, the word “test”. Cleaning data is the majority of analytics … Read more
There is a specific kind of silence that happens when you run a query in front of someone. The spinner turns. You start talking to fill the gap. You mention that the table is quite large. Two minutes later you are apologising. Most slow queries are not slow because the database is weak or because … Read more
If you have ever downloaded a sentence transformer to cluster support tickets, pulled a dataset off the Hub to test a model, or run a quick sentiment pass over survey responses, you have used Hugging Face. Most of us treat it the way we treat GitHub or PyPI: infrastructure. Boring, reliable, always there. That changed … Read more
There is a moment in most analysts’ careers where they stop writing SQL that works and start writing SQL that is good. For a lot of people, that moment is window functions. Before you learn them, certain problems feel genuinely impossible in SQL. Rank each salesperson within their region. Show each month alongside the previous … Read more
Every analytics team has one. A dashboard that took three weeks to build, got a nice reception in the demo, and now gets opened twice a month, both times by the person who built it, checking whether it still loads. I have built a few of these. The uncomfortable part is that they were not … Read more
Most writing about India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act is aimed at compliance officers and lawyers. It talks about governance frameworks, fiduciary obligations and board constitution. That is useful for the people who have to file things. It is close to useless if you are the person who actually writes the queries, builds the dashboards … Read more
There is a specific kind of Monday morning misery familiar to anyone who has worked in analytics. Open the laptop, run four queries, paste the results into a spreadsheet, fix the formatting because the date column came through as text again, write a short email, attach the file, send. Forty minutes. Every week. Forever. The … Read more