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 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.

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 sponsored by dbt Labs.

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 dbt Labs.

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 https://roundup.getdbt.com.

The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Show description: Scott Breitenother, founder of data consultancy Brooklyn Data Co., joins Tristan at Coalesce 2024 in Las Vegas to discuss the early days of dbt, the evolution of data teams, and what's next for the dbt community.

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.

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 everything from prototypes to production AI applications.

Nisha Paliwal, who leads enterprise data tech at Capital One, joins Tristan to discuss building a strong data culture for in the world of AI. She is the co-author of the book Secrets of AI Value Creation. 

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.

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 place, and finally, arriving at whether or not Copilot‌ makes a difference. In the search for real business value, this research is a real bellwether of things to come.

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.

Join data practitioners and data leaders this October in Las Vegas at Coalesce, the analytics engineering conference hosted by dbt Labs. Register now at coalesece.getdbt.com. Listeners of this show can use the code podcast20 for a 20% discount.

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 and where they might take us. 

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.

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 from classical fact and dimension data, and why it needs different analytical tools.

Make sure to check out the back half of the episode, where they dive into AI and how Motif is applying breakthroughs in language modeling to train foundation models of event sequences—check out his team’s blog post on their work.

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.