Allegiance out of their Austin office. We build a customer feedback data analysis platform. Always innovating with data mining, text mining, social media, survey, and operations data to find new insights for our clients. Looking for talented .Net software engineers who love to find more value in data.
if you're on a .Net platform, you may want to take a look at Dundas Data Visualization http://www.dundas.com. Just try to avoid the defaults :) We use these for data vis at http://allegiance.com.
I found Greasemonkey helpful for learning Javascript, because it lets you try interesting things on already interesting sites. If you're a product manager, who can program a little, it's a handy way to try product concepts and interesting mashup ideas.
I've enjoyed making some scripts for Twitter for example.. Take a look at this one which let's you view Twitter Bios at a Glance:
I've been using http://icombinator.net on my iPhone. Doesn't have all the bells and whistles of a native app, but works great! You an see the "about" link there to contact the author.
I think the Programming Collective Intelligence is going to go down as one of the most important and influential books of the decade.
I'm a product manager, but was a Java & Perl programmer previously. I didn't know Python before I read this book. But the concepts are presented so clearly, the examples use web APIs, and the spark of creativity each chapter brings too great, that I could not resist the urge to fire up iPython on my Mac and play with some of the algorithms.
The book's examples are all command-line driven. But I've also converted a few of the examples into web projects to help me explore the possibilities more efficiently and demo/prototype some things for my company. Python works perfectly well as a CGI web application and you don't need the overhead of Django for learning and taking examples from this book to the next level.
I've since read several data mining and machine learning books, and must say that none come close to the breadth, programming detail, and hands-on ease presented in this book.
The book has created a rich opportunity to learn and explore concepts such as collaborative filtering, clustering, optimization, decision trees, and text mining with Bayesian classification.
yah.. I wrote it partly to take that ambiguity away.. also seemed a shame to take up some of your 140 characters with a long url, then only to see that Twitter compressed it for you in the saved Tweet, reminding you that you could have typed more :)
sort of related, I wrote a Greasemonkey script to automatically create bit.ly urls as you type a Twitter Tweet. Does it on the fly. Uses the bit.ly API. Check it out at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/39042
several dev jobs available: http://www.allegiance.com/company/careers.php#ssd