“Testing always beats guessing,” Nick Berry told his audience during his session at Casual Connect USA 2014. He continued on, providing his view on growth hacking.

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Nick Berry has come full circle. As a kid, Berry loved loved playing with computers — including programming games. However, like many boys, he also loved rockets and airplanes. When the time came to enroll at a university, he faced a tough decision between his two passions. While a degree in video games or video game programming was unheard of in those days, degrees in computer programming and aeronautical/astronautical engineering did exist.

“I solved the problem with the arrogance that only youth provides! I humbly decided that I already knew plenty about computers and that it would be a waste to go to college to be taught by some professor about something I already knew about!” Berry says. “Also, technology was moving so fast that all the books about computers at the time I read seemed to talk about paper tape and punch cards. Why learn about those antique things?”

Settling on engineering, Berry eventually emerged from university with a master’s degree. He was all set for a career as a research scientist at the UK Ministry of Defense when an old friend invited him to join a software company he was starting.

The company, NextBase Ltd., was very successful and won numerous accolades for its work in mapping software, including The Queen’s Award for Technology, presented by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991. In 1994, the business was sold to Microsoft, and Berry joined the Microsoft team in America to continue work on the mapping products. Eventually, seeking a new challenge, he joined a small team at Microsoft tasked with connecting players around the world to online games.

After years and years, Berry was back in computer gaming.

Facebook and Gaming

Berry now works as a data scientist at Facebook, where gaming still plays an important role. Although Facebook doesn’t make games itself, “we love games (and their developers), and the scale is massive,” Berry says. “In 2013, we paid out over $1 million each to more than 100 developers.”

Currently, there are over 375 million Facebook-linked gamers across desktop and mobile devices. Facebook provides tools and services to help with login and authentication, help serialize and store game data in the cloud, tools and services for marketing and promotion, and mechanisms for players to share achievements and progress with their friends and family.

Berry notes that over 70 percent of people who use Facebook for iPad worldwide have played a Facebook-connected game in the past 90 days. There are over 260,000 apps built around Parse, Facebook’s solution to make it easy for developers to use the cloud to store data, and the Facebook ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ buttons are viewed over 22 billion times a day.

Berry’s job involves picking through all the data Facebook accumulates for useful information. “There is an immense fire-hose of data flowing into Facebook every second,” he says. “This data has to be refined and concentrated to make it actionable: What games are people playing? Who is spending money? How many games are they playing at the same time? If people like one game, do they like another? … and hundreds of other questions. I help boil the ocean, looking for statistically significant trends and patterns, and turn raw data into more refined and digestible summaries.”

Trust and the Knowledge Economy

Being a data scientist gives Berry a unique perspective on data, and he is an advocate of data “trust,” which he feels is a better term than “data privacy.” “‘Privacy’ is the wrong word to use these days,” he explains. “We should be using the word ‘Trust.’ We are living in a knowledge economy, and the value many of us add in this industry is in the manipulation of information — not in the creation of some tangible hardware product. We take raw data (often customer data), and add value to it. We should use this data respectfully. People trust us with it. Without trust, people will not share, and data is the fuel of the knowledge economy.”

He admits that “trust” can be hard to define, but that once it’s breached, it becomes clear. He notes that people handling data should “say what they do and then do what they say.” Transparency is extremely important — it should be made clear what a company is doing with a customer’s data and what that customer is getting in return for the data. That way, there are no surprises from people about what is being done with their information.

He adds that “sensitivities change over time, and so correspondingly, does what is considered ‘private.’ ‘Trust,’ however, is more constant. You either trust your bank, or you do not. You trust a friend, or you do not. When asked if you trust your bank, you base this on how they behave. You never hear a reply ‘Well, I read their privacy policy from cover to cover and agree with their fair information privacy practices.’ You trust your bank based on how they act.”

Away From the Datastream

Because of all the computer time involved with work, Berry spends his free time staying active and healthy. To that end, this year will be the fourth consecutive year he runs in the Seattle Half Marathon. “I’m a very slow runner, but I run the entire way without stopping. I do, however, find running incredibly boring, so I typically run and train with a media player and listen to audio books.”

Much of his free time is dedicated to his 10-year-old twins. However, when he gets the time, he does enjoy sharing what he knows in various ways. He’s an avid blogger, with his blog DataGenetics revolving around “data science, gaming and general geekery” — and he also mentors for the start-up/gaming community in Seattle. Two of his biggest accomplishments are also helping educate people: A TED talk on online safety which he calls a “very humbling, enjoyable experience” and a jet engine he built from scratch as the final project for his university degree — which, 26 years later, is still in use teaching new waves of engineering students.

The next feat he’d like to accomplish?

“I want to build a log cabin. I’ve got the land; now all I need is the spare time.”