Who am I?
My name is Bruce A. Lee. I am an Analytics Engineer. I live in Florida and I graduated from UCF in Undergrad, which means I am a Knight, and proud of it. I now attend Georgia Tech within their graduate program OMSA for Data Analytics.
I came to data the long way around. I studied sociology, which is the discipline of asking hard questions about people and refusing to look away from the answers. Somewhere along the way I noticed that the statistical methods I had learned in undergrad were not just academic exercises — they were levers. You could move things with them. So I taught myself R after work, with a friend’s help, and I learned what tidy data was, and what messy data was, and why the difference matters. It turns out it matters quite a lot. My tools are SQL, Python, R, Tableau, and Excel.
Why hire me?
Because I ask questions, and I ask them on purpose. I want to know why a decision was made before I build anything to support it, because a pipeline built on a misunderstood requirement is just an expensive way to be wrong. I have found that the right question, asked early, saves everyone a great deal of trouble later. I have also found that people like being asked. It makes them feel, accurately, that someone is paying attention. I love figuring out how a business actually works; not how the org chart says it works, but how it works. Then I look for the places where it could work better, and I improve them through process refinement and patient iteration through my modeling process.
I ask my stakeholders what metrics matter to them, and then I make those metrics as accessible as I can, especially to the people downstream who have to live with the data long after I have moved on to the next problem. Data should be a resource, not a riddle. That is the whole job, really.