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Analytics Playbook |
If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it. - Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850)
The aim of this project is simple: information deserves to be free.
The "analytics" industry is no longer a community of like-minded analysts, sharing techniques and lifting each other up. Now, it's just vendors and consultants writing advertisements about how they can "help" you (assuming you're willing to fill out a lead-gen form, for no more details than thinly-veiled sales pitch). Gone are the days where people shared analysis techniques, provided code snippets or even wrote JavaScript plugins and gave them away to the community; now it's just multi-thousand dollar conferences, where the speakers do nothing more than ape the knowledge that can be learned freely from a Tufte book, or from an (un-sourced) blog post.
It's 2016, we can do better! For the cost of $20 for a domain name and an hours time, this website was created. Now, it's time to start being that open, welcoming industry again.
The aim of this site is to provide simple, "one-pager" style articles following a "Problem-Action-Resolution" framework:
- State a bite-sized business problem/question
- Show how you solved the problem/question
- EXPLAIN why the solution works (with business impact if possible)
It's clearly not always feasible to use actual data, but where possible, using a generated or anonymized dataset will always help with understanding or will be highly valued by the community.
While authors should feel free to link back to their own sites as necessary (such as for expanding upon a topic beyond the limited "one-page" style of this site), this is not intended to be a link farm. Submitting just links, or half-written teasers to link to other sites will be deleted/rejected. Otherwise, there are no restrictions on who may post, as long as it is useful to the community (beginner through expert-level).
Submissions will be made using GitHub, using GitHub-flavored Markdown. By using GitHub, this project can truly be a community affair; not only can anyone create a GitHub account for free, but articles will be able to be edited by anyone via pull request (subject to community discussion/approval).
A template is provided for convenience. Markdown takes a little bit of getting used to, but ultimately it's a great plain-text format, while still allowing for rich display of content. A simple submission could just be to place a Markdown file in the main directory (where index.md resides), and editing the sidebar.html file to include the link to your article under the proper heading.
Since not everyone has experience with GitHub, here are some useful links:
If you would like to contribute, have tried to use GitHub and are still stuck, there is also an email option.