The Analytics Engineering Podcast

Daniel Avancini is the chief data officer and co-founder of Indicium—a fast-growing data consultancy started in Brazil. 

There are a lot of data consultancies around the world, and a lot of them do great work. What has been so fascinating about Indicium’s journey is their HR model. Rather than primarily hiring experienced professionals, they decided to go hard on training. They built a talent pipeline with courses and an internal o...

Hamilton Ulmer is working at the intersection of UI, Exploratory Data Analysis, and SQL at MotherDuck, and he's built a long career in EDA. Hamilton and Tristan dive deep into the history of exploratory data analysis. Even if you spend most of your time below the frontend layer of the stack, it is important to understand the trends in both the practice of data visualization  and the technologies that underlie that practice.

For ful...

Fivetran recently passed $300 million ARR and has over 7,000 customers globally. Taylor Brown, the cofounder and COO of Fivetran, joins the show to talk about Fivetran’s moat, the impact of AI on the data ingestion space, and open table formats and catalogs. 

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.

The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsor...

Cedric Chin runs Commoncog—a publication about accelerating business expertise. He joins Tristan to talk about the analytics development lifecycle, how organizations value (or misvalue) data, and why “data teams are not some IT helpdesk to be ignored.”  

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.

The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by...

Erik Bernhardsson, the CEO and co-founder of Modal Labs, joins Tristan to talk about Gen AI, the lack of GPUs, the future of cloud computing, and egress fees. They also discuss whether the job title of data engineer is something we should want more or less of in the future. Erik’s not afraid of a spicy take, so this is a fun one. 

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to...

Former co-host Julia Schottenstein returns to the show to go deep into the world of LLMs. Julia joined LangChain as an early employee, in Tristan’s words, to “Basically solve all of the problems that aren't specifically in product and engineering.” LangChain has become one of, if not the primary frameworks for developing applications using large language models. There are over a million developers using LangChain today, building ev...

Dr. Eirini Kalliamvakou is a senior researcher at GitHub Next. Eirini has built a career on studying software engineers, how to measure their productivity, how developer experience impacts productivity, and more.

Recently, Eirini has been working on quantifying the impacts of GitHub Copilot. Does it actually help software engineers be more productive? Tristan and Eirini explore how to quantify developer productivity in the first pl...

Yohei Nakajima is an investor by day and coder by night. In particular, one of his projects, an AI agent framework called BabyAGI that creates a plan-execute loop, got a ton of attention in the past year.

The truth is that AI agents are an extremely experimental space, and depending on how strict you want to be with your definition, there aren't a lot of production use cases today. 

Yohei discusses the current state of AI agents an...

Misha Panko has worked in data for a long time, including on high performance data teams at Uber and Google. Today, Misha is the co-founder and CEO of Motif Analytics, a product focused on helping growth and ops teams understand their event data.

In this episode, Tristan and Misha nerd out about the state of the art in computational neuroscience, where Misha got his PhD. They then go deep into event stream data and how it differs f...

Eric Avidon is a journalist at TechTarget who's interviewed Tristan a few times, and now Tristan gets to flip the script and interview Eric. Eric is a journalist veteran, covering everything from finance to the Boston Red Sox, but now he spends a lot of time with vendors in the data space and has a broad view of what's going on. Eric and Tristan discuss AI and analytics and how mature these features really are today, data quality a...

Barry McCardel is the co-founder and CEO of Hex. Hex is an analytics tool that's structured around a notebook experience, but as you'll hear in the episode, goes well beyond the traditional notebook.

We're big fans of Hex at dbt Labs, and use it for a bunch of our internal data work. In this episode, Barry and Tristan discuss notebooks and data analysis, before zooming out to discuss the hype cycle of data science, how AI is differ...

Matt Turck has been publishing his ecosystem map since 2012. It was first called the Big Data Landscape. Now it’s the Machine Learning, AI & Data (MAD) Landscape. 

The 2024 MAD Landscape includes 2,011(!) logos, which Matt attributes first a data infrastructure cycle and now an ML/AI cycle. As Matt writes, “Those two waves are intimately related. A core idea of the MAD Landscape every year has been to show the symbiotic relationshi...

Matthew Lynley is a bit of a hybrid. He's been a long-time journalist covering enterprise tech, currently in his fantastic AI and data newsletter Supervised, and he's also been a hands-on data practitioner. 

Matthew has covered the analytics tech stack, but this time Tristan turns the tables to get Matthew’s perspective on the rise of Gen AI as a topic in the popular press, what's going on in the space today, and where AI is headed...

Juan Sequeda is a principal data scientist and head of the AI Lab at data.world, and is also the co-host of the fantastic data podcast Catalog and Cocktails. 

This episode tackles semantics, semantic web, Juan’s research in how raw text-to-SQL performs versus text-to-semantic layer,  and where we both believe AI will make an impact in the world of structured data analytics.

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of...

Benn Stancil, cofounder and CTO at Mode, returns to The Analytics Engineering Podcast to discuss the evolution of the term "modern data stack" and its value today. Tristan wrote on this idea for The Analytics Engineering Roundup in Is the Modern Data Stack Still a Useful Idea?

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.

The Analytics Engineering ...

Moritz Heimpel from Siemens and Ben Flusberg from Cox Automotive have very similar jobs. They both act as stewards of the data strategies at large, complex companies.

In this episode, we get into what it’s like to collaborate with data at scale. Ben and Mortitz share their experiences adopting a data mesh architecture and what that looks like at their organizations.

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the pod...