You’ve probably seen videos of a long chain of dominoes falling, one after the other, to create elaborate artwork or portraits. These domino videos are so satisfying because they demonstrate the domino effect: tiny actions lead to massive results.
The same idea applies to data science. When you work on an analytical project, a single small mistake can set off a series of mistakes that cascade into big errors and delays. That’s why it’s important to start small, and build a consistent routine that will help you achieve your goals.
Domino’s began to address this issue by revamping their employee training program, and by incorporating best practices from software engineering into its workflows (such as version control). Unfortunately, tools that facilitate these data science best practices don’t yet match the maturity of those in software development, leading many teams to awkwardly graft them onto their workflows or, lacking resources for custom development, tolerate inefficiency.
Lily Hevesh fell in love with dominoes as a child, when her grandparents gave her the classic 28-pack. She started arranging the little rectangles in curved or straight lines, and she began posting online videos of her creations. Now, Hevesh is a professional domino artist who works with clients to create spectacular setups for movies, TV shows, and events.
She also demonstrates the domino effect in her video, by announcing that a single domino can knock down things that are about one-and-a-half times its size. The key to this is gravity: When you stand a domino upright, it has potential energy based on its position. But when you touch it, the energy of that force is converted into kinetic energy, and the domino falls.
To play domino, players place a domino in front of them on the table, and then take turns laying additional ones on top of it. Each piece must be played before the next player can play. The game ends when a player cannot continue; in most games, the winner is the person who has the most total spots of all the remaining pieces on their end of the board.
Domino has been used for centuries to demonstrate how a tiny action can have huge effects. Today, this concept is increasingly important as we face a world of complex systems where small errors can trigger big problems. For example, in the medical field, a drug shortage can lead to patients not being able to get the medicines they need. This could cause a cascade of problems, such as people not getting treatment or even dying from lack of medicine.
Domino is an open platform that allows you to integrate your favorite languages, IDEs, and data sources. The Domino Catalog includes certified partner integrations that have been tested and verified to work with Domino, as well as other tools you can access through code-first APIs or connections. The catalog is continually growing, so contact Domino Support if you see something missing! You can run Domino on-premises or in a hybrid multi-cloud environment, and you can self-manage it or choose a fully-managed service.