Data Science from the Open Jungle

In 2013 I travelled from Buenos Aires to Patagonia to Lima to Machu Pichu to the Amazones to Colombia to San Fransisco. The trip lasted for a good six months and I worked for two days a week over whatever wifi I could find while I was travelling. Turns out there's fantastic wifi in the Amazones! The entire trip earned me more money than it cost. How did I pull all of this off? Not everybody understands how quickly one can bootstrap solutions for problems with open source tools given some data. At the time there weren't many people that called themselves data scientist and even less people understood the role of open source in the ecosystem. In this talk I will demonstrate how embarrassingly easy it is to get started solving problems with the open source stack compared to the somewhat aged business intelligence workflow. I'll use examples from using game data (pokemon and world of warcraft) and demonstrate how quick you can get started making better decisions with little effort. Even if the dataset is needs a cloud environment for scale you can still deal with it from the open jungle.