The Analytics Engineering Podcast

Brittany Bennett is Data Director at Sunrise Movement, the youth climate movement that numbers tens of thousands of members throughout every US state. Given how quickly our industry moves, developing junior data talent is hard, but Brittany's team at Sunrise makes it look easy. And that's no accident—because Sunrise hires for mission alignment rather than technical background, they dedicate significant resources to training + mentorship. In this conversation, Tristan, Julia & Brittany dive deep into the opportunity of developing junior data practitioners. 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 dbt Labs.

Caitlin Colgrove, Co-founder and CTO of Hex, shares her journey from Palantir to building a collaborative data workspace focused on SQL and Python. The conversation highlights the transformation of traditional notebooks into real-time collaborative tools, emphasizing a Google Docs-style approach for data teams. Caitlin discusses the importance of integrating interactivity in data apps, innovative writeback workflows, and the human-driven aspects of data automation, all while envisioning a future of evolved data tools reminiscent of web development.

Erik Bernhardsson spent six years at Spotify, where he contributed to the first version of the music recommendation system. After a stint as CTO at Better.com, he's now working on building new infrastructure tooling for data teams. In this wide-ranging conversation with Tristan & Julia, Erik dives into the nuts and bolts of Spotify's recommendation algorithm, (paradoxically) why you should rarely need to use ML, and the fundamental infrastructure challenges that drag down the productivity of data teams. 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 dbt Labs.

In this episode, we're going to do something a little different, and turn the spotlight on co-host Julia Schottenstein. In this conversation with Tristan, you'll get to know Julia a bit—from her early childhood ambitions of becoming a "computer tycoon" (adorable!), to working in venture at NEA and now as a Product Manager at dbt Labs. They also dive into Julia's opinions on key trends shaping the future of the data industry (the phrase oligopoly makes an appearance). 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 dbt Labs.

Brian Amadio is a Data Platform Engineer at Stitch Fix, where experimentation underpins everything they do across merchandising, planning, forecasting, operations and more. In this conversation with Tristan, Julia, and Brian you'll get into the weeds of executing multi-armed bandit experiments and learn how you can perform experiments even with limited data. 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 dbt Labs.

Step with Venkat into a world where data is always fresh, queries run in 1ms, and analytics engineers build web-scale, real-time data apps. As Engineering Director at Facebook, Venkat helped build the RocksDB real-time database that powered growth to 5 billion queries per second(!)—and now with his colleagues at Rockset, he's bringing that real-time database infrastructure to the rest of us. In this conversation, Tristan, Julia and Venkat explore the fundamental technological advances that are empowering analytics engineers to enter the real-time future. 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 dbt Labs.

Robert Chang is a product manager for the data platform at Airbnb, where he helped build and roll out Minerva, Airbnb's internal metrics store. They use Minerva to track over 12,000(!) metrics and 4,000(!) dimensions with consistency across the organization. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Robert dives into why they built it, what it took to get it done—and crucially, what you should do if your company doesn't have the resources to build your own internal metrics store. 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 dbt Labs.