You'll see a lot of posts coming down the line on documentation.
We surveyed our customers last quarter and asked where our data pipeline was lacking. It turns out the most painful part of using our data pipeline, is reading the documentation. I've been interesting in learning how to write great documentation for a while, so I volunteered to spend a significant amount of time reworking our documentation this quarter.
To summarize, our team tries to make telemetry data useful. Some of us build tools to make accessing the data easy, others work on processing the data and making it available in an efficient and understandable format. Last quarter I worked on the latter, pipelining hte data to make the format better.
This year, I'll be working as a data ambassador.mentor, going out to teams, identifying their data needs, and helping them reach their goals.
Data is an incredibly useful tool. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of building useful projects. However, even though we have a great product, it's useless if our users don't understand how to use it.
We have a great tool for our customers, but it's not worth the energy to learn about it. It's easier to do a one off analysis that is kind-of right.
If you have a data product or tool without documentation, it's more likely than not that someone is misusing your data. The hardest part of making data useful is understanding how it was collected and in what situations it is appropriate.