What is Data Rampage?

A personal newsletter about the world of data

Hi!

I’m Randall Helms (that’s me above), and welcome to Data Rampage, which will be my personal newsletter about the world of data.

What do I mean by ‘personal newsletter’? Well, Substack is a newsletter tool (obviously), and this will be a very personal perspective on data , meaning that I will be writing about whatever interests me in the field, and filtering it all through my own perspective. I’m going to write with my own, distinct voice, and try to avoid making it sound too corporate, too processed … too bland. I know that in the era of GPT3 the temptation is there to just feed prompts in and get algorithmically produced content back, but where is the fun in that?

My goal, such as it is, is to express myself, share my thoughts, and learn from others.

What I’ve loved about data ever since I (somewhat unexpectedly) came into this line of work is that as a professional field it constantly offers me the opportunity to do two things that I love:

1. Learn news things

2. Solve problems

With this newsletter I hope to achieve both, and also to share my learnings how I solved specific problems with you, the reader.

I see this newsletter as first and foremost for my colleagues in the data field; whether they are analysts, data engineers, data scientists, analytics engineers, or, like myself, in leadership roles. A secondary group for whom this newsletter might be interesting would be data stakeholders; people who work regularly with data teams and want to better understand the inner workings of such departments. Finally, this might be of some use to a general interest audience (hopefully!).

This very first edition will function as an introduction to myself and to the newsletter.

Who am I and why should you care about my opinion?

A fair question!

I am a 42 year-old native New Yorker who has been living in Berlin, Germany, for nine years, having moved from London, where I had lived for many years (with also a period living in beautiful Edinburgh)

I’ve now been in the data field for ~12 years, so I have quite a lot of relevant experience to share, and I have also taken something of an interesting route to get to where I am today - I don’t have any kind of technical academic background, so I kind of fell into this line of work, found I liked it and was good at it, and then learned the necessary technical components over time, through learning on the job as well as studying on my free time during nights and weekends.

In terms of my work history in data, I started with data analysis and then moved to the management side, and I’ve worked in a range of industries, such as online video news, video on demand, audiobooks, and banking. So I’ve experienced a lot of different scenarios and faced a wide variety of challenges along the way, and hopefully gained some wisdom as I’ve progressed.

My own journey, with its successes and failures, will definitely be something to discuss in greater detail in the future.

Most recently, I’ve been the VP of Data at Penta, a Berlin-based neobank that was acquired by the French firm Qonto in July 2022. After the acquisition, I decided that the time was right to explore new opportunities, so after a short break to recharge I’m now focusing on what’s next.

And this newsletter is part of that process!

What am I going to talk about?

Sitting down to write this, I was thinking of saying that I don’t plan to focus on any one specific topic; but actually, when I made a list of topics to discuss, I realized that a lot of them are related to data leadership. I suppose this is natural, because this is what has been most on my mind over the last few years, as I have built full-fledged data teams first at Neugelb (a Commerzbank subsidiary), and then at Penta.

Some things that I already plan to discuss are:

• Building data teams - where to start? What roles do you need?

• Hiring for different data roles

• Transitioning from an individual contributor to a data leadership role - my own journey and what I learned from it

• What knowledge of other disciplines do you need as a data leader? For example, I was an analyst, what did I have to know about data engineering to effectively manage data engineers?

• Defining a data strategy for the short, medium, and long terms

• Working with your key stakeholders (and how to identify them)

• Increasing data literacy within the organization

• Building a data stack that is right for you and for the company

• Reactive vs proactive analytics

• What makes a good KPI?

Besides these kinds of leadership topics, there are a number of other data-related topics that interest me, and that I might also touch on:

• Building a tracking plan for collecting behavioral data from frontend systems

• Snowplow Analytics and how to work with it

• Marketing attribution

• Programming in R: tips, tricks and how to build your own packages

• Data visualization and what makes an effective dashboard

• Reviews and discussion of different tools

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, honestly. I could probably go on and on and on about potential topics, but that’s good for now, I think! Feel free as well to suggest any topics that you might be interested in.

Why Data Rampage?

Since 2008 I’ve been writing a music blog devoted to electronic music called Sonicrampage (you can also listen to my dj mixes on Soundcloud, if you are so inclined), so I thought Data Rampage would be a nod to that much longer running project.

Of course, the title is a little tongue-in-cheek, as there will certainly be no rampages, and this particular newsletter project will be pretty sedate and cerebral.

Data Rampage will be completely free for the foreseeable future; I can’t imagine that I will ever be prolific enough to charge for it. It’s going to drop into your mailbox on an irregular (if not erratic!) schedule, but hopefully each edition will contain something interesting and useful for you.