Having been a female my entire life and interested in numbers for nearly as long, I’m passionate about getting more women to work with data.  We know that there’s a gender imbalance in data analysis roles across the industry. Even at REA Group, only about 30% of our data analyst roles are currently held by women.  With data roles projected to grow by nearly 20% over the next five years and data becoming increasingly important in fields from marketing to HR to agriculture, it’s a great time to encourage more women to enter the field.

One of the ways we’re doing this at REA Group is to partner with Datadriven.sg to run full-day Data Girls workshops, designed to give an overview of tools and techniques for data analysis and how data is used to drive business decisions.  In our first two workshops we’ve hosted over 120 women from many different industries, including education, music, medicine, and marketing–all with a range of experience in using data.
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At REA we happily use a variety of programming languages. Teams are given the freedom to choose a fitting language for a given project. Mostly this ends up being one of Ruby, Java, or Scala. However, there are some languages that we as developers and ops people get excited about, but the viability as a mainstream REA language hasn't yet been established.

For me personally, Haskell is what I code on the weekends and I've been looking for a way to shoehorn it into my regular work 😉

Recently I learnt that REA does in fact have some Haskell in prod. Who owns it? What does it do? No one will ever know. However as the story goes, it was automating a manual task and as such it was simply a value add that became a useful tool, and avoided questions like 'just what is a monad anyway!?'.

Jim Gaylard and I, Haskell acolytes, attempted something similar on hack day.