Welcome to the Practical Data Challenge, a weekly arena where data people sharpen their skills, share solutions, and have a little fun along the way.

Whether you’re into data modeling, SQL, pipelines, or AI workflows, these challenges are designed to help you practice real-world problems in a lightweight, community-driven format.

🎯 How It Works

1. New Challenge Posted
   • Every week (or two), I’ll post a fresh challenge on Substack and pin it in our Discord.
   • Examples:
     • “Design a schema for tracking product inventory across warehouses.”
     • “Transform this JSON into a sessions table with SQL.”
     • “Model event time vs valid time in an IOT system.”
2. Submit Your Solution
   • Post your answer in the #arena-submissions channel on Discord.
   • Solutions can be:
     • SQL snippets
     • ERD diagrams/screenshots
     • Jupyter notebooks or GitHub gists
     • Even just a well-reasoned written explanation
3. Community Voting
   • Members react to submissions with ✅ 🔥 💡
   • Top-voted entries earn extra points.
4. Leaderboard Updates
   • Each week, we’ll tally scores:
     • Submission = 5 points
     • 1st place = +10 points
     • 2nd place = +7 points
     • 3rd place = +5 points
   • Leaderboard lives here in Notion + gets shared in Discord + Substack + YouTube recaps.

🗳️ Scoring and Community Voting (at a glance)

• Submitting any valid solution = 5 points
• Community picks 1st, 2nd, 3rd by reactions in Discord
  • 1st place = +10
  • 2nd place = +7
  • 3rd place = +5
• Voting window: Day 1–7, closes end of Day 7 Mountain Time
• Winners announced with the weekly recap. Leaderboard updated in Notion.

How voting works

1. Post your solution in #arena-submissions with a short description or screenshot.
2. Community votes by reacting with ✅ in the thread.
3. We rank entries by total reaction count across the ✅ emoji.
4. Ties are broken by a final match between the winning submissions, where community votes by reacting with the 🔥 emoji. The submission with the most reactions wins.