Purpose

The purpose of this site is pretty straightforward: to help you do stuff with data.

Data is quickly becoming a key medium of communication and center of knowledge in the 21st century. Most people, unfortunately, have very limited skills to make use of the copious data available in many industries. Schools have focused on reading, writing, and arithmetic but have largely left people ill-equipped to wrangle and derive insight from data.

This site’s goal is to fill in some of the gap by equipping you with highly practical skills, techniques, and concepts to use data in your day-to-day work. Wherever you are now in terms of skill and technical knowledge, Doing Stuff with Data aims to help you “level up”. For some people, leveling up may mean figuring out how to build a fully automated machine learning pipeline that runs continuously in a cloud-based container environment; for others, it may mean finally learning how to use VLOOKUP (or rather its recent replacement XLOOKUP) in Excel. Either way, this site wants to help you do something useful with data.