I'm excited to announce that I'll be presenting at the Open Data Science Conference in Boston next week. My colleague Saptarshi and I will be talking about When the Bootstrap Breaks.

I've included the abstract below, but the high-level goal of this talk is to strip some varnish off the …

I'm working on an urgent and high priority request for the next few weeks. To make sure I can finish this work in 2018 I'm limiting my meetings and communications for the remainder of the year.

Slack is good for getting my immediate attention, but if your request takes more …

I was talking with Mark Reid about some of the problems with Coding in a GUI. He nailed part of the problem with soundbite too good not to share:

"If you can't do it in a day, you can't do it."

This is a persistent problem with tools that make …

Data science is weird. It looks a lot like software engineering but in practice the two are very different. I've been trying to pin down where these differences come from.

Michael Kaminsky hit on a couple of key points in his series on Agile Management for Data Science on Locally …

I came across You can't do data science in a GUI by Hadley Wickham a little while ago. He hits on a lot of the same problems I mentioned in Don't make me code in your text box. Take a look if you have some time. In the first 15m …

Over the next few quarters, I'm going to focus my attention on Mozilla's experimentation platform. One of the first questions we need to answer is how we're going to calculate and report the necessary measures of variance. Any experimentation platform needs to be able to compare metrics between two groups …

I'm happy to announce, we now have a SQL style guide. Check it out!

If you have any suggestions, feel free to file a PR or issue in the docs repository.

Many thanks to all who participated in the St. Mocli conversation and @mreid for the review!

I got caught giving some bad advice this week, so I decided to share here as penance. TL;DR: Probabilistic counts are great, but they shouldn't be used everywhere.

Counting stuff is hard. We use probabilistic algorithms pretty frequently at Mozilla. For example, when trying to get user counts, we …

Whenever I start a new data project, my first step is rooting out any false assumptions I have about the data.

The key here is iterating quickly. My workflow looks like this: Code a little, plot the data, what do you see? Ah, outliers. Code a little, plot the data …

I've been thinking about experimentation a lot recently. Our team is spending a lot of effort trying to make Firefox experimentation feel easy. But what happens after the experiment's been run? There's not a clear process for taking experimental data and turning it into a decision.

I noted the importance …

Will posted a great article a couple weeks ago, Giving and Receiving Help at Mozilla. I have been meaning to write a similar article for a while now. His post finally pushed me over the edge.

Be sure to read Will's post first. The rest of this article is an …

I have a problem managing projects I'm interested in but don't have time for. For example, the CLI for generating slack alerts I posted about last year. Not really a priority, but helpful and not that complicated. I sat on that project for about a year before I could finally …

I'm removing Disqus from this blog. Disqus allowed readers to post comments on articles. I added it because it was easy to do, but I no longer think it's worth keeping.

If you'd like to share your thoughts, feel free to shoot me an email at harterrt on gmail. I …

Over the years, I've developed a pretty involved productivity system. It was originally based on Getting Things Done, but now it's grown to include the good bits from other systems. It's involved, but I love it.

I get a lot of comments, especially on the little black book I keep …

I finally got a chance to scratch an itch today.

Problem

When working with bigger ETL jobs, I frequently run into jobs that take hours to run. I usually either step away from the computer or work on something less important while the job runs. I don't have a good …

Mission Control was a major 2017 initiative for the Firefox Data team. The goal is to provide release managers with near-real-time release-health metrics minutes after going public. Will has a great write up here if you want to read more.

The key here is that the data has to be …

Introduction

At Mozilla, we're quickly climbing up our Data Science Hierarchy of Needs ¹. I think the next big step for our data team is to make experimentation feel natural. There are a few components to this (e.g. training or culture) but improving the tooling is going to be …

My comments on Bug 1422892 started to get long, so I started untangling my thoughts here.

From the bug:

We experimented with using activity_date instead of submission_date when developing the clients_daily etl job. We should summarize our findings and decide on which of these measures we'd like to standardize against …

I feel like I'm swimming in acronyms these days.

Earlier this year, my team started using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for our planning. It's been a learning process. I had some prior experience with OKRs at Google, but I've never felt like I was fully taking advantage of the …

At Mozilla, we're still relatively early in our data science journey. As such, we're always evaluating new tools to improve our analysis workflow (jupyter vs. Rmd), or make our infrastructure more usable (our home-rolled ATMO vs. databricks), or scale our knowledge (knoledge-repo. vs. gitbook)

Most of these tools look like …