Category: Podcast

Johan van de Werken thrives best at the sweet spot between data, business & technology. 

Graduating with a philosophy degree from the University of Utrect, my guest started his career as a journalist for several Dutch publications, writing about everything from events and  pop culture to media, politics and economics. Around 2014 he switched from letters to numbers, working in CRO for several European e-commerce businesses. That led him to building dashboards and leveraging cloud platforms to turn raw data into usable marketing insights.

Working at an analytics firm that exposed him to BigQuery, he thought about sharing  what he was learning. Seeing that the  domain GA4BigQuery.com was available, he registered it and started posting there as a side gig. It got noticed by Simo Ahava, the founder of Simmer. That led Johan to release the GA4 and BigQuery course on their training platform. As we fast forward to 2023, GA4BigQuery is now a well-known resource for marketers. And its creator is now consulting full-time on data analytics under his own brand, Select Star.  Except for when he’s having fun playing in a punk rock cover band. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

SelectStar

GA4BigQuery

Johan on Medium

Funnel Reboot episode with “Learning Google Analytics” author Mark Edmondson

Definition of ETLDefinition of an IDE

Data warehouses are amazing things: you can toss all kinds of information into them then pull mind-blowing insights out the other end. This feat can happen because you’re connected to outside systems holding their own database tables. A copy of whatever has recently gone into the table is taken out and shot through a data pipeline and pushed into your data warehouse. But today’s data stacks contain Multiple clouds, hybrid environments, and so many data pipelines the programs in charge of monitoring and logging the flows almost can’t manage them. It becomes overwhelming to manually check and ensure the quality and integrity of the data.  The more sophisticated the systems, the more errors creep into the data. If we rely on flawed data, the outcomes and insights we generate will be equally flawed. This is where data observability comes in.

In this episode you will hear about something called an observability platform. It identifies real-time data anomalies and pipeline errors in data warehouses. Now there’s a twist here because we’re in a cloud computing environment that charges by number of computing cycles. You don’t want an observability tool that’s another pipe accessing client data and running up the meter. The good news is there’s an easier way to detect when data has gone awry, by comparing log files – basically  metadata – they are just as effective at alerting you to problems. 

If you’d like what this is doing described in a completely non-technical way, think of Hans Christian Andersen’s Princess and the Pea. There is a girl who comes to a castle seeking shelter from the rain claiming to be a princess. The queen doubts whether she is truly of noble blood, and offers her a bed, but this bed has twenty mattresses and twenty down-filled comforters on it. A pea is placed underneath the bottom mattress to test if this girl detects anything. The next morning, the princess says that she endured a sleepless night; there must have been something hard in the bed. They realize then and there that she must be a princess, since no one but a real princess could be so delicate.

I spoke with Yuliia Tkachova, the co-founder and CEO of Masthead Data, a company which recently received $1.3M in a pre-seed round. Originally  from Ukraine, Yuliia came to found Masthead after work that convinced her of the need for an observability solution. She had roles as a Product Manager roles at OWOX BI and Boosta, where their data solutions encountered problems. Prior to that, she did marketing for RAGT.  She has Bachelors and Masters degrees from Suma State University, specializing in MIS & Statistics. She also serves as an Organizer at MeasureCamp, a volunteer community where analytics professionals come together to learn.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Masthead’s YouTube Channel

Connect with Yuliia Tkachova on LinkedIn 

Splunk

NewRelic

Image credit: Edmund Dulac in Hans Christian Andersen tales

Analytics is something that everyone says they want, and some brag that they can analyze very well. But few people know what investment’s required to build a quality analytics function, and even fewer are good at justifying its value. 

Our guest Martin McGarry is so passionate about analytics, as you’ll see from his  backstory, if anyone can articulate the business value of analytics, it’s him. 

After completing a Bachelor of Science from The University of Manchester and studying at the University of Cambridge as a Doctoral Candidate, our guest worked in the UK analytics practice of a global Management Consultancy.  Due for a change after 6 years of that, he moved to Ottawa Canada and founded his own consultancy so he could offer a more independent approach. A while later started the firm he’s been leading for nearly 15 years, Bronson Analytics. 

In 2018 he began a recurring event in Ottawa called Beer & Analytics, which draws hundreds from the field together for learning and socializing. In 2022, the event went outside of Ottawa for the first time, being held in Toronto. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Martin’s LinkedIn profile

Machine Learning Expert Andiy Burkov

The Hundred-Page ML Book

Synthetic data vendors like DataRobot

Simulation running, via tools like Simul8