October 7, 2017
Welcome to my new blog! This first post will describe what I intend to write about, provide a bit of background about myself, and tell you about the name of the blog
What will I write about?
I am in the home stretch of a three year journey to a Master’s Degree in Data Science. My intent is to write a few initial posts about my interest in data science, why I chose to enroll in an MS program, and some of my experiences in the program. Interspersed with these posts and the focus of future posts will be perspectives on applying data science to work and other projects.
Some of you may be familiar with the blogging that I’ve done in the past at Microsoft Development on the Prairie (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dave_froslie/). I created that blog in 2005 and have written just over 100 posts on topics such as Scrum, Microsoft Fargo, Dynamics AX, and software testing. My most recent posts on that blog were in 2016. That blog is going to be retired soon and I will be cross-posting a few recent articles on software test here. This accounts for the (mostly) in this post’s title.
Who am I?
I’m a software architect that has worked for Microsoft in Fargo since 2002. In my time at Microsoft, I’ve worked as a lead, a manager, and an architect. My focus in the past couple years has been on migrating the Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations product (formerly Dynamics AX) to a more cloud safe customization approach. Before that, my focus was on software test patterns and frameworks.
I also spent several years working for MTS Systems in Eden Prairie, MN building test systems used to structurally test planes and cars. Besides the upcoming MS in Data Science, I have an MBA from the University of St. Thomas and a BS-EEE from NDSU.
For a more complete background, check out https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-froslie-6875812/. You can also follow me on Twitter at @DaveFroslie.
What’s in a name?
Techopedia defines a data lake as “a massive, easily accessible, centralized repository of large volumes of structured and unstructured data” (https://www.techopedia.com/definition/30172/data-lake). Software author Martin Fowler contrasts a data lake with a data warehouse in https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/DataLake.html. A data lake provides agility and flexibility that a data warehousing approach doesn’t.
I also happen to live on a lake, one of the 10,000+ in Minnesota. The ‘Lake Data’ part of the name is a simple twist on ‘data lake’, and gives me an excuse to share lake photos like the one above.
The last word, ‘Insights’, is the most important word in the name and is why I’m drawn to data science. I love the process of uncovering the knowledge hidden in the data. The insight might come from basic statistics, visualization, finding a way to join seemingly disparate data, mining big data, clustering, machine learning, or other data science techniques. Developing a new understanding of a problem domain that leads to better decisions is the ultimate goal.
Lake Data Insights is a blog about seeking knowledge from data. Thanks for taking the time to help me get it started!