As data scientists, our work sways elections; our models move markets; our recommendations launch and dismantle businesses. In positions of such influence, we haven’t the time to waste on petty distractions of little import. Which is why I believe it’s critical to step back...and take on a far more consequential matter: Should SQL queries use trailing or leading commas?

Our data doesn’t always look nice and clean. Mode's Data Scientist, Nate Coleman, shows us how visualizing distributions can tell us if our data is skewed or not—and how logarithmic scales can clarify it for us when it is.

Lars Kamp is the Co-Founder & Chief Data Engineer at intermix.io where he helps customers optimize Amazon Redshift and their analytics queries for peak performance. We’ve invited intermix.io to share a guest piece detailing the new data stack.

The World Chess Championship 2018, a match between reigning champion Magnus Carlsen and challenger Fabiano Caruana, just came to a conclusion in London. Since all twelve classical games were drawn, the players entered a tiebreak round, where Carlsen was crowned world champion. This is the first time all classical games have been drawn, and many chess fans expressed disappointment in what seemed to be a “dull” or “bloodless” series of games.

When we talk to analytics teams about what they're working on and what big projects are coming up, this is a common refrain we hear:

“Right now, we're working on getting data out to people and making sure everyone has the right dashboards. We also want to answer some of the bigger questions that are causing problems for our business, but it's important that people have what they need first.”

In case you missed it, we launched a free product earlier this year, Mode Studio.

Free products aren't common in the world of analytics. Even less common, we launched ours after already having built a strong business around a paid product. Quite often in the last six months, we've been asked why we did it.