Stop wasting time reading my drivel. You need to head over the the DataWrangling.com blog and read Peter Skomoroch’s interview with Bradford Cross of FlightCaster.

Peter wrote up this interview back in August 2009, so I’m a little late to this party. There’s some really great quotes in this interview. Here’s a few of my fav quotes from Cross:

At Google, the research scientists prototype in python and R, and then port to C++ for the real scalable map reduce runs.

Building layer upon layer of abstraction is a big key…  The technical term for this is “wrap the crap.”

Here’s a problem I think anyone who works with data and models can relate to:

I made a lot of mistakes early in my career in building trading models where I let me theories get too far ahead of what I could really test in practice. That is not a good place to be. Unfortunately, this is an easy mistake to make.