…and why the data community is like a music scene
This week marks the third birthday of Greyskull Analytics! My very first blog post over on greyskullanalytics.com was made on 26th March 2021.
I’d planned to mark the occasion with a post to talk about all the great opportunities and experiences I’ve had since launching the website and talk about why developing a personal brand can be such a great catalyst for your career.
But then I let myself distracted with my brain going off on a tangent… Because I got to thinking about how the data community is kind of like a music scene.
I speak from experience on this topic… I am indeed a scene kid myself (can I call myself a kid in my forties?). In fact last Friday I fulfilled a life long ambition as I got to roadie for a band. Of course, I’m making that sound more glamourous than it actually was. I own a campervan and some guys I know who are in a band asked if I could drive them and their kit to a gig in Manchester. I was happy to oblige, a) to scratch my life long itch of being able to call myself “crew” but b) because these are a bunch of guys who I’ve met through a music scene. We share a common taste in music (alt rock wannabe 90s grunge) and a love of a lot of the same bands.
There’s one band in particular that we’ve bonded over; Dinosaur Pile-Up. That’s ok… no one else has heard of them either.
I first got into DPU back in 2010 – I can’t remember how I stumbled across them, but the first time I heard them I was hooked, and I knew I needed to see them live. Those first few gigs were in dodgy venues in obscure places like Carlisle, watching the band playing to 30 punters. When bands are starting up and playing those kind of gigs in their formative years, they’ll spend time chatting with fans, and I ended up getting to know the band members relatively well. By the time they hit relative success and were selling out small venues in 2018 whilst touring their third album, they’d still say hello, and we even went out partying together one night when they had a day off mid tour.
By this point, I didn’t just know the band, but was friendly with their crew, and spent quite a bit of time socialising with their sound engineer and tour manager.
It was around about this time there started to develop a real community around the band. You’d see the same faces in the crowd at shows, we’d all keep in touch with each other over social media, and started to even arrange socials away from shows.
When the pandemic hit, the bands tour manager Olly wrote and recorded some material of his own, and when he released it (under the pseudonym Jaws the Shark – yes, this is a reference to Brit sitcom Peep Show) that community were quick to support it.
Jaws the Shark has since earned a record deal, and last week was the launch party for the lead single for his upcoming debut album. When he booked a show in Manchester as part of the launch celebrations, he asked my friends band Anxiety Trip to open for him (side note, Anxiety Trip is actually the name of a DPU song).
Going on this journey through my own fandom, to being a part of this launch event as crew really drew parallels for me with my data community experience and the journey Greyskull Analytics has also been on.
The first step is with data rockstar adoration. Starting out as an enthusiastic data professional, you find yourself drawn to industry personalities and they leave you in awe of their knowledge and expertise. I found people like Chris Webb, Alberto Ferrari, Marco Russo and Adam Saxton to be sources of learning as well as inspiration.
At some point, if you feel you’re starting to master your craft, you may wish to try and emulate some of those heroes. In fact, I recommend it. Getting your own thoughts and opinions out there on paper or video is a great way to both deepen your knowledge on a particular topic and give fellow professionals another source (and perhaps a unique take) on a subject.
I’d also encourage you to get involved with the community. You may decide that you don’t want to become the person on stage delivering a session, but still going along to support as an attendee or maybe even a volunteer is still invaluable and helps build that community and make it stronger.
By doing that, you’ll probably also discover that those rockstar data personalities you were previously in awe of are actually pretty normal people. I’m yet to come across anyone that hasn’t been approachable and happy to say hello and have a chat. Some of them are even partial to a friendly beer.
Data folks also tend to be incredibly supportive. It’s not a competition to see who is the best – we all level up together and giving people new to the scene opportunities is one of the key features of that. Ultimately this leads to a great spirit of camaraderie and togetherness.
So, the data community is not just about the headliners. It’s not just about the top tier rockstar personalities. Like being part of the DPU crowd for me, the data crowd has been about getting to know people you look up to, it’s been about getting to know the supporting cast (and sometimes playing a part as a member of that supporting cast), it’s about being an advocate and giving your support to events as an attendee whilst building a network of fellow data professionals (and friends). It’s about being vocal about the love of what we do and bringing other people along for that ride, ultimately building a scene that is bigger than a sum of it’s parts.
I feel privileged to be part of such a vibrant community and am looking forward to watching it continue to thrive. Let’s make sure we all do our part to keep it thriving! I hope to see you at an event soon!
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