The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Practical Applications for Time Series Forecasting with David McCandless of McCandless Consulting

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll get to meet our guest and hear about the topics we're going to cover. If they're interesting to you, you can catch the full-length show when it drops on Wednesday. We're here on the show with David McCandless. David, welcome to the Data Stack Show. Thanks so much, Eric. All right, well, so much to talk about,

and I love your story of going from sort of the biggest of the big to small. We'll unpack what that means throughout the course of the show, but give us a little bit of your background. How'd you get into data, And then what do you do today? Yeah. Yeah. So I studied chemical engineering at Georgia Tech and started my career in oil and gas. And then basically got married, needed to change jobs when the oil market was down. So I kind of had to reinvent myself. And I ended up in this budding field called analytics. I thought that it would suit me really well. Started a master's degree online at Georgia Tech. I was actually in the beta cohort of GT OMSA

and graduated in May, 2020. So kind of 2017, started different analytics positions. First analyst, then manager. And then my last full-time position for a corporation was with Amazon from 2020 to 2022. First year there, forecasting. Second year, kind of a data engineering role. And towards the end of my time at Amazon, started working for myself and really enjoyed that. And then towards the very end of my employment with Amazon, they offered a voluntary severance package. And I saw that as a way to make my side hustle at my full-time job. So that's what I've been doing since early 2023.

Nice. And David, one of the topics I'd really like to talk more about is time series forecasting. I think we were talking before the show, that's an area that gets ignored and it has so many practical, you know, practical applications for a business. So I'm excited to jump into that topic. Is there anything you want to discuss? Yeah, I'd be happy to jump into the topic of time series forecasting. Nice. All right. Let's do it. Let's do it.

All right. That's a wrap for the prequel. The full length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don't miss it.