Blog: Technical and Leadership Articles

From a Sr. Business Intelligence Leader at Amazon

The Dangerous World of Self-Service Analytics analytics analytics engineering data sql Apr 10, 2023

 

Most analytics leaders put self-service analytics at the top of their list of items on their annual roadmap, but they never seem to talk the potentially disastrous implications of creating self-service tools. Enabling self-service analytics sounds straight forward where data engineering...

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SQL Best Practices analytics analytics engineering data data engineering sql Jun 18, 2022

In this post I’m going to share some best practices for formatting SQL that I’ve learned and used over the last 20 years. Many of these tips are things that I’ve collected along the way out of frustration with inheriting code, needing to perform updates, chasing down bugs, and...

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Building a Better Analytics Organization - Implementation (Part 7) analytics analytics engineering data data engineering Jun 11, 2022

Welcome back to Part 7 of Building a Better Analytics Organization. In parts 1–5, we covered a number of challenges that analytics organizations face and in part 6, we covered a comprehensive solution. In this part, we’ll discuss how to implement the solutions within your...

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Building a Better Analytics Organization - The Solution (Part 6) analytics analytics engineering data data engineering Jun 04, 2022

Welcome to Part 6 of Building a Better Analytics Organization. So far, we’ve discussed:

Part 1 — Introduction, common tasks, and an introduction to challenges for an individual and for a team
Part 2 — Overview of the common areas where problems can occur and the...

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Building a Better Analytics Organization - Table Issues (Part 5) analytics analytics engineering data data engineering May 28, 2022

Welcome to Part 5 of my series on Building a Better Analytics Organization. In this part, we’ll be covering a few issues surrounding the usage of tables and views.

Part 1 — Introduction, common tasks, and an introduction to challenges for an individual and for a team
Part 2 ...

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Building a Better Analytics Organization - Visualization Issues (Part 4) analytics analytics engineering data data engineering May 21, 2022

 

We’ve arrived at Part 4 of Building a Better Analytics organization and in this part, we’re going to cover issues around visualizations within applications such as Power BI and Tableau since those are the two most common applications. In this article, We will highlight the...

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Building a Better Analytics Organization - Code Issues (Part 3) analytics analytics engineering data data engineering May 14, 2022

If you’ve been following along, this is Part 3 of my series on Building a Better Analytics Organization — Code Challenges.

Part 1 — Introduction, common tasks, and an introduction to challenges for an individual and for a team
Part 2 — Overview of the common areas...

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Building a Better Analytics Organization - Common Issues (Part 2) analytics analytics engineering data data engineering May 07, 2022

Welcome back to my series on Building a Better Analytics Organization.

Part 1 — Introduction, common tasks, and an introduction to challenges for an individual and for a team
Part 2 — Overview of the common areas where problems can occur and the specific problems that...

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Building a Better Analytics Organization - Introduction (Part 1) analytics analytics engineering data data engineering Apr 30, 2022

Welcome to Part 1 of my 7-part series on Building a Better Analytics Organization. In this series we’ll be discussing how to create a connected analytics world to help you move faster, with fewer bugs, and less headaches. In this article, I’ll cover a background of the analytics...

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What is Jira and Why Should I Be Using It? analytics analytics engineering data data engineering management Apr 22, 2022

If you’ve never used Jira (or any other issue tracking software) then allow me to introduce you to Jira. If you are an existing user, hopefully I’ll be able to share a few practices that may be of benefit to you and your environment. This article provides an introduction to Jira and...

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Analysts are not Software Developers (but they should be) analytics analytics engineering data data engineering Apr 02, 2022

 

Over the last 20 years, I’ve been consistently working in the tech space and I’ve worked as an individual contributor and a manager with 6 different companies. I started out in software quality assurance engineering, wrote various applications, and later moved into analytics...

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A Canary in the [Data] Coal Mine analytics analytics engineering data engineering Feb 25, 2022

Over the last 10 years dashboards have become a crucial asset in the analytics space. Stakeholders want dashboards built for limitless reasons, analysts and managers rely on them for daily insights, and the dashboard vendors (such Tableau and PowerBI) assert the power, ability, and potential of...

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