Applying engineering best practices to data science is a well-intentioned effort, but it has to be done with care. The raw materials, goals and organizational roles of the two professions are different, so treating DS like eng sets it up to look like engineering done badly
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(And as a side note, since I'm a shameless
@LocalOptimistic stan, this article by@AyRenay and Caitlin Moorman captures the same innovation/productionization split under the names 'circular' and 'linear'! https://locallyoptimistic.com/post/linear-and-circular-projects-part-1/ …)Show this thread -
At any rate, both workflows are similar to software engineering since they're based around writing code, and when it comes to the literal process of writing code, DSes should copy SWE by checking their work into version control, writing unit tests, etc.
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The departure point is the code's input. Rather than working with well-understood production database, DS works with the wild world of log data. And as Heraclitus said, no one ever steps in the same data lake twice, for it's not the same data lake and they are not the same person
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The fact that the shape and volume of input data can change so quickly is what makes writing DS code hard. Statistical (and data) modeling is all about encoding assumptions, and the logs of a fast changing product can upend your assumptions in real time.
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Rather than focus on changing the raw data, DSes are better suited to making their data transformations more robust to variation in said raw data. This can be hard to wrap your head around if you think data should always perfectly reflect what happened in your product.
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But it's also why it's called data SCIENCE. It's about finding signals in noise. It uses similar tools to SWE, but it's a fundamentally different craft. Being crisp about this distinction saves you the grief of looking like an amateurish engineer
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End of conversation
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