Tamalpais Group merged with phData in December of 2021. This was a struggle for me because I was so personally attached to the identity of a "Data Mercenary" and being part of a small company where you can count employees on one hand. Like Mick taught us, "You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, well, you just might find, You get what you need." Going further, you often don't even know what you want.In terms of innovation, I'm what they call a "late adopter". I'm the last to own a new technology or try a new service. It took me over 18 months to change this entry from "[Redacted]" to "phData". The truth is that I am so proud to be a member of this hugely talented team that I can no longer keep it to myself.phData's core values of Grit, Community, Curiosity and Psychological Safety have changed me as a person. I've had to question everything I thought I knew about my approach to analytics, working with a large team and most importantly, being vulnerable enough to trust them.My first project with phData was the polar opposite of what I'd done for the last seven years. Instead of being a small, scrappy team doing whatever it took to get the analytic result, we were multiple teams across several workstreams engaged with the corporate machinery of one of the largest solution and staffing organizations in the world. It was a deeply educational and humbling experience to learn how to scale and work within the constraints of a highly governed project. It was a great success in many ways.I still identify as a "Data Mercenary" who is there for the client when no one else can help, but now I have an army of the greatest data and analytics minds ever assembled to back me up.

Proving out the best practices in developing data pipelines from system of record through data warehousing to visualization using the latest in cloud-first technologies with an emphasis on the professional services industry.

Fhoado Torg (pronounced fəʊˈæ dəʊ tɔɹɡ), a "fanciful & arbitrary" trademark name as recommended by the USPTO, is the future-proof triple-set solution framework for happiness in humanity. Evolving slowly from architecture designed to alleviate the harm caused by natural disasters (eg., Hurricane Katrina) and man-made disasters (eg., 2008 Mortgage Crisis), the new minimum viable products for Fhoado Torg are professional services including Big Data Processing, Analytics, Machine Learning and AI.The long tail for Fhoado Torg is an ecosystem of domestically-outsourced professional services delivered remotely from sustainable exurban and rural "Torg" villages built from the highest quality modular, mobile architectural elements for multiple-lifetime use.

There is a point where people ask themselves, “Is money enough?” or worse, “If I participate in a system, am I culpable for its behavior?” I was fortunate enough from my previous roles to be afforded the privilege of asking these questions. When an opportunity arose to work again with a former colleague and learn a new skill, I jumped at the chance.In all of my previous roles, there was always a reporting component that usually meant a great deal of work was done in MS Excel, Access and PowerPoint to produce periodic charts and reports that were printed, bound and shuffled away never to be seen again. The futility and inefficiency of these processes meant never admitting you were an Excel charting wiz or you would be saddled with these tasks.Tableau changed that game.In my role, first, as Consultant and, later, as Director of Analytics at this Tableau Consultancy, I fell in love with creating charts and graphs again. My deep understanding of data could now be expressed in beautiful and interactive forms in a fraction of the time it previously required. The joy of working with clients 1:1 and meeting them where they are in their data journey provided me with a sense of fulfillment that money cannot buy.I was able to introduce clients across a wide variety of industries to thinking in terms of processes, identifying their best data management approaches available and visually analyzing their data to discover insights they’d never before known.The Tableau suite of software including Tableau Desktop, Server, Online, Reader and Public provide a complete infrastructure for every practitioner, enterprise, use case and budget.

My hard skills in Big Data and soft skills working with executive level audiences developed at BAC. My first role was an Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) App Developer working with Teradata, Oracle and MS SQL Server on the Finance Data Warehouse (FDW); the source for all Non-Basel Regulatory Reporting. Numerous ETL scripts written in COBOL, ANSI SQL, Teradata SQL, Transact-SQL and PL/SQL were executed daily. The task was to accept changing regulatory requirements, identify relevant jobs, analyze hundreds or thousands of lines of code and implement the appropriate changes.A later consultant role focused on bridging differences between Basel and Regulatory Reporting. A first strategy was to completely circumvent the FDW and build a new MS SQL Server ETL engine. The goal was to provide Basel and Regulatory reporting with an identical data source. All results demonstrated that a multi-year effort would have been required to align these data sources. Ultimately, the solution proved to be a reconciliation between the final data sources of both tracks in terms of company, cost center and GL account and create 100% risk-rated synthetic balances at that level.My final role as a Sr Reporting & Governance Analyst in support of Dodd-Frank section 165(d) provided unparalleled insight and access into the global view of BAC. We were a 10-person team tasked with partnering across the enterprise to produce a living will that demonstrated BAC was not “too big to fail”. One of the highlights of this role was transforming an unstructured Request-For-Information designed by a big four consulting firm into a structured data repository allowing pivot-table style analysis to document interconnectedness between core functions and the infrastructure on which they depended. My fondness for this role was at its peak when I discovered that connecting with clients one-on-one as a trusted advisor and skilled data practitioner brought me the most joy as a vocation.

Perhaps my most mercenary of all roles, the short time I spent at HSBC was predicated on a guarantee of a six-month severance package for even one single day of employment. Again, my reputation among former colleagues for MS Access and VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) landed this role. The timing was in the midst of the Mortgage Crisis. HSBC’s sub-prime lending business, Decision One (D1), was actively conducting a Reduction-In-Force. A business analytics team that had consisted of twelve people had all fled leaving the manager, a former colleague of mine, to support a highly complex VBA Sales Analytics application. This app was critical in understanding D1’s rapidly decaying sub-prime lending business. A week’s worth of reverse engineering MS Access macros, MS SQL Server stored procs and html web front-end led to forty pages of documentation and the necessary understanding to keep this complex app running a few months longer. Also while supporting the existing sales analytics, I developed some geospatial analytics using MS Access and MS Mappoint to understand which sales staff in the field had the most potential to continue high sales and which employees to prioritize in the RIF.My most memorable moment in this role was passing one of the hundreds of empty cubes on the floor my manager and I occupied. Abandoned in that cube was a tacky etched glass award celebrating $6 billion in sub-prime loans generated in June 2006. Congratulations Team, you did it.I worked here for about seven months and bought a Yamaha V-Max motorcycle with the severance package.

A former Premier colleague recommended me for a MS Access App Developer role at LT to build a software requirements warehouse for the Lend-X Software-as-a-Service Mortgage Marketplace. This was a white label version of LT’s own legacy marketplace for institutions like Fannie Mae and BAC. A second MS Access app for QA testing was needed to ensure parity between the legacy and SaaS databases. This app queried both databases and aligned the results in a side-by-side dashboard for QA staff to perform unit testing. The final app provided the business support team with daily reporting to Lend-X clients.In my role as Configuration Manager, I became deeply familiar with the physical infrastructure of application, web and database servers in SDLC environments. Meticulous record-keeping and organization was required to ensure that code was staged and promoted through these environments. One of the more demanding roles in my career, the stats speak for themselves. In the course of one year, I managed 54 scheduled builds and 408 emergency pushes consisting of over 3,000 turnover documents and 80,000 individual files. My clients consisted of 6 Quality Assurance Specialists, 36 Software Developers, 7 Database Administrators and 5 System Administrators. My final role was the support and monitoring of all LendingTree production systems. It was in this role that I was able to develop strong SQL skills while troubleshooting the MS SQL Server database artefacts of application errors. The production environment consisted of dozens of application, web and database servers running labyrinthine code with a host of quirks (eg., memory leaks). Tribal knowledge had developed on which servers or services had to be handled in order to resolve queueing and other alerting issues. My first foray into knowledge bases was here where I implemented the open source MediaWiki software (ie., Wikipedia’s underlying software) to capture that tribal knowledge.

My task as data analyst in this firm's hospital operational data benchmarking tool was to support the data submissions of approximately thirty hospital management engineers. Data submissions were evaluated manually. Values, when eyeballed, that seemed to be outliers were either nullified or pushed back to the management engineers for validation. To eliminate this inefficient process, I built an MS Access database with VBA automation that would evaluate each data submission against the hospital's own history. Simple statistical process control techniques in this database greatly enhanced our team's productivity and data quality.

My first genuine relational database was built here using Lotus Approach. This Yield Loss Tracking Database recorded work orders by all relevant dimensions (eg., material types, machines, configurations, yield and waste). The published results would go on to demonstrate an inverse relationship on productivity and yield between upstream and downstream processes.

My journey in data began at this automotive component manufacturer with the plant's industrial engineering team. I cut my teeth on Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS writing WYSIWYG macros for production and inventory control systems.