Oh yes… yet another productivity blogpost. Great.

Still you clicked. I will try not to disappoint. Let me give you a bit of context of why you’re here. You’re reading this among your 50 chrome tabs, with an email draft unfinished, and three documents halfway. Feeling of remorse kicks in, right? But don’t go back to your email yet.

There are many articles written on this topic by billionaires, serial entrepreneurs, even navy admirals. I write this because normal people can also achieve these improvements in their lives, without having changed the world, or fought on the WWII. …

Office Hours

I recently finished Remote’s book, and reflecting on the last 8 months working remotely, I wanted to share a bit the learnings on managing a high performing data team on a remote environment. Those learnings apply to any area, they are not data specific. Since this situation may last for another year, I hope you can capitalize on those learnings.

This pandemic has been the first fully remote experience for many companies. At the same time, we are all locked down at our homes, seeing limitations on their personal freedom. It is an interesting test, albeit not the best experimental setup. We have too many things happening at the same time, and it’s easy to associate a badly performing team to remote. …

Badi, as the leading room rental marketplace, is inherently full of media content. We actually mean it, users have uploaded millions of pictures since we launched three years ago. If you have a spare room, you’ll upload plenty of pictures of your cool apartment that make it stand out. Moreover, you’ll want your future roommates know how you are, and in your profile you’ll include a good looking selfie, but if you’re a pet lover, you could also add a snap of your four legged friend, and hence describing more about your personality than just typing it on your bio.

This leaves our Data Scientists with a vast amount of unstructured data to analyze. We already use structured data from user profiles, such as age, occupation, gender, etc. to understand their behaviour in the platform, study how new and exciting features fare, craft better recommendations for our users, and so on. Our next logical step were pictures. There are many analyses we could do, and improve our user experience if we harness this information. What knowledge can we get out of them? Do some users only contact rooms that are full o natural light? Do they prefer to live with people that depict themselves practicing sport? Let’s try to answer some of these questions, but before, we’ll need to translate these images in a way a computer can understand. …

As the leading room rental marketplace, Badi is inherently full of media content. We really mean it; users have uploaded millions of pictures since we launched three years ago. If you have a spare room you’ll upload plenty of pictures of your cool apartment that will make it stand out. …