How to Make Charts That Shine Using AI
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Data leadership insights, analytics engineering best practices, and strategic thinking for data teams.
Will AI Do to Code What CAD Did to Drafting?
Looking at old photos of drafting rooms, I found a useful analogy for where software engineering is headed.
The confidence that I have in my taste, and my ability to express what I feel
10 lessons from six months of vibe coding with AI tools like Cursor and Claude Code, inspired by Rick Rubin's creative philosophy.
Five things Dua Lipa can teach us about building trust
Why Dua Lipa's book club interviews are a masterclass in earning trust (and how you can steal her techniques)
How to Lead Without Authority: Four Proven Approaches
Have you ever had that moment where you knew exactly what needed to happen, but didn't have the authority to make it so. I once faced this exact situation.
Surprising Truths About Data Leadership (That No One Tells You)
After speaking to many data professionals about leadership recently, I've discovered something unexpected: the most influential leaders aren't who you think ...
My Favourite Books of 2024: Powerful and Inspiring Reads
In 2024, the books I’ve read didn’t just inform—they uncovered hidden truths, challenged my thinking, and sparked ideas I never saw coming.
My 5 Most Popular LinkedIn Posts of 2024
From podcast recommendations to the R-Python debate, here are my five most popular LinkedIn posts of 2024 and the lessons each one taught me.
How to Drive Out Fear From Your Workplace
Five real stories of workplaces where psychological safety was missing, and what they taught me about driving fear out of teams.
The Three Dimensions of the Five Deadly Diseases
Deming's five Deadly Diseases of management examined through the Joiner Triangle: quality, teamwork, and scientific thinking in practice.
5 Tips For Organising a Neuroinclusive Conference
Practical tips for making conferences inclusive for neurodivergent attendees, based on my experience as an autistic speaker at posit::conf(2024).
The tragedy and the farce of the red beads experiment
Deming's Red Beads Experiment shows why blaming workers for systemic failures is both a tragedy and a farce. A look through the lens of Profound Knowledge.
10 Critical Excel Mistakes That Cost You Time (2025 Update)
A story caught my eye in the news this week: Warehouse Group staffer hacks system, steals $95k vouchers to ‘mess with bosses’.
5 Spreadsheet Horror Stories (#4 Is My Favourite)
From ancient Babylonian clay tablets to deadly COVID-19 contact tracing failures, these five real-world spreadsheet horror stories show what happens when Excel is used where it shouldn't be.
The Greatest duo you've never heard of
Why Deming and Shewhart matter more than Big Data or AI: how the founders of the quality movement shaped the way we should think about data.
User story first, data story later
You’re in the board room, slides at the ready as you begin to recite your well-rehearsed run-through of the numbers to the lead team.
Five Common Spreadsheet Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Spreadsheets: love ‘em or hate ‘em, they’re ubiquitous. Think of an office job and the first thing that comes to mind is probably a spreadsheet.
Donkey data
Three lessons from being the first Insights Manager at the Donkey Sanctuary: be helpful, be flexible, and be patient when building data culture.
How building this dashboard got me a job as a data analyst
It was 2019, I’d just moved to New Zealand and landed an interview for a job as a data analyst. They wanted me to present some of my work using Power BI.
What World of Warcraft taught me about leadership
Three leadership lessons from running a World of Warcraft guild: issuing clear instructions, recruiting for character, and balancing priorities.
World Enough and Time
A four-dimensional framework for prioritising data work in nonprofits and public sector organisations: governance, operational, strategic, and niche.
Turbo-charge your data work with these five books in 2024
Five book recommendations for data professionals covering Scrum, visual storytelling, DevOps, data engineering, and strategic measurement.
Downstream effects
Why fixing data problems downstream is a losing battle. Lessons from DevOps and a flooded Auckland on swarming issues and solving them at source.
The Personal and the Programmatic
Why a truly data-driven culture embraces emotion and personal experience alongside facts. Lessons from Tim Harford's The Data Detective.
Treasure Data
How New Zealand's ESR wrote a beautifully concise data strategy in just two pages, and what its Māori-inspired principles can teach every data leader.
What I learned from attempting a dozen data challenges
Lessons from completing 12 Workout Wednesday challenges in Tableau: Level of Detail expressions, trellis charts, hex maps, and self-compassion.
Charting my progress
A visual journey through two years of Tableau Public submissions, from simple NHS bar charts to long-form data stories about gender equality.
Making it back into Makeover Monday
How I got back into Makeover Monday by recreating a US meat consumption chart in Tableau, and discovered a Label feature I'd overlooked for years.
What's a Direct Debit donor worth?
How to use Tableau box plots to visualise Direct Debit donor retention, and why the standard 5-year value projection may be dangerously optimistic.
An Unequal SET
An analysis of gender representation in STEM subjects across UK universities, revealing persistent inequalities and the challenges of achieving equal representation in science, engineering, and technology fields.
His Story today, her story tomorrow?
A data-driven analysis of gender representation in History Today magazine, examining the underrepresentation of women's voices in historical writing and the implications for the broader historical community.
Letting it all hang out there: #MakeoverMonday
How I found and told the story of Cold War Olympic rivalry in under an hour for Makeover Monday, using nothing but simple bar charts in Tableau.
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