New year, new chances to get together
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A short post this week because I spent all weekend busy with running a small conference and working into the wee hours of the night. Then the kid threw up all over their bed towards the end of writing… 🙄
Making MORE space for mistakes
Data Mishaps Night is Feb 23th!! The deadline to submit a talk is Feb 2nd! I highly recommend everyone attend this event, and if you have a story to share, to submit your mistake and share. The event is people who work with data sharing big, painful, mistakes that they’ve made. It’s NOT recorded so as to provide a safe space for people to share the juicy details of what happened, so the only way to experience it is to attend.
I’ve already written about the event in 2022, “Making room for mistakes”, and the sentiment within remains true. It’s very important for people, especially more senior experienced data folk, to come out and show that it’s OK to make big catastrophic mistakes. It happens to everyone and happens with surprising frequency no matter how many safeguards and processes we put in place to try to prevent them. This event is a great, almost necessary, part of the data community because data teams are so time and scattered that we haven’t put together the same blameless post-mortem culture that is part of the larger software engineering/SRE community.
Watching people making games to expand horizons
A long time ago, I wrote about how games are a wonderful playground for learning and honing data science skills because they’re these super-accessible things exist in a vacuum that has little connection to the real world. It’s a way to stretch your analytical and data collecting muscle because you can’t take pre-made models of the real world and directly apply them to the completely artificial rules of a game system.
I’m going to take this one step further and suggest that watching people discuss how they produce things, like games, is a really good way to learn stuff. Learning about how other people make stuff is often how I wind up picking up another hobby, but it’s also a way for me to snowball knowledge of other domains into my life. Games is particularly easy to access because the audience of “Game developer” is usually very broad and many people wear multiple hats, so unlike many other industries, many talks don’t expect you to have taken a full beginner’s course before diving in.
Over the past month, I’ve been busy organizing a tiny game developer’s conference for visual novel developers. Even though I’ve semi-retired from working in the space now due to other work, I can’t help but be fascinated watching everyone talk deeply about the messy details about their work. The fact that it’s all about people making games from scratch also means that it touches upon a LOT of things that are probably not directly related to my day job in data/UX research, but is merely a handful of steps away.
For example, there’s plenty of talks about the business side of things. This year we had a talk about hiring and working with voice actors that went into the various terms and expectations used in that particular space that people who aren’t used to working with voice talent wouldn’t know. This includes lots of tiny game developers who are probably going through the hiring process for the first time. While this knowledge probably isn’t useful to many of us here today, it’s probably useful perspective for anyone touching a field that works closely with performers and hiring talent.
For bigger, more mainstream talk topics, you can check out content from the Game Developers Conference (GDC) (and also on YouTube), probably the biggest gamedev conference out there. There’s a mind-boggling range of stuff stretching from art, audio, VR, tech, accessibility, narrative design, and even subscription-based business models. Game developers need to handle EVERYTHING, from the physics and rendering effects to doing he marketing and content delivery of their games nowadays and it’s a far cry form many of the businesses units that we have to analyze and interface with on a regular basis.
And you never know, maybe you’ll find the whole notion interesting enough that you’ll want to actually try making your own game yourself. The basic programming skills needed to start is easily covered by the skills needed to do data work. It could be a pretty easy way to start a new hobby.
As for myself, I’m going to pass out now after a long weekend of running around organizing and editing video.
If you’re looking to (re)connect with Data Twitter
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About this newsletter
I’m Randy Au, Quantitative UX researcher, former data analyst, and general-purpose data and tech nerd. Counting Stuff is a weekly newsletter about the less-than-sexy aspects of data science, UX research and tech. With some excursions into other fun topics.
All photos/drawings used are taken/created by Randy unless otherwise credited.
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