Tristan Handy

Tristan Handy 14 Jan 2020 January 14, 2020 Tristan Handy

The inability to bridge the chasm between IT and the business is the core dysfunction in modern data teams, and it’s also the biggest opportunity for progress.

Tristan Handy 24 Sep 2019 September 24, 2019 Tristan Handy

If your time is valuable, it should be important to you to operate with the highest possible leverage. This allows you to get more done with your fixed number of hours. Simple. Here's how analysts can operate with leverage.

Tristan Handy 17 Sep 2019 September 17, 2019 Tristan Handy

Data teams are successful when they build reserves of trust. One important way to build trust is by consistently delivering projects on time. Here are four questions we've found to be useful in helping us spot the potholes that derail analytics engineering projects.

Tristan Handy 2 Jul 2019 July 2, 2019 Tristan Handy

680 companies use dbt every week, 2100 members of dbt Slack, dbt Cloud processed 140k jobs from 200 accounts in June, and we're hosting regular dbt Meetups in 3 cities (NY, SF, London). What a year!

Tristan Handy 10 Jun 2019 June 10, 2019 Tristan Handy

Holy crap! Within the past week we’ve seen the acquisitions of the two biggest players in the modern BI landscape, Looker and Tableau.

Tristan Handy 14 May 2019 May 14, 2019 Tristan Handy

Unnesting arrays on Redshift is a pain, but it’s doable. This post walks through the entire process, start to finish.

Tristan Handy 4 May 2019 May 4, 2019 Tristan Handy

Thoughts on pricing strategy and what it communicates about your company's vision for the future of the market you're in.

Tristan Handy 16 Jan 2019 January 16, 2019 Tristan Handy

Sinter just became dbt Cloud. Why the re-brand?

Tristan Handy 2 Jan 2019 January 2, 2019 Tristan Handy

The role of the data engineer in a data team is changing rapidly. Are you thinking about it the right way?

Tristan Handy 6 Sep 2018 September 6, 2018 Tristan Handy

The hardest thing about scaling a company is communication. Here's how our latest release will make data communication just a little bit easier.

Tristan Handy 6 Jul 2018 July 6, 2018 Tristan Handy

This week marks the second anniversary of Fishtown Analytics. Here's what we learned.

Tristan Handy 13 Jun 2018 June 13, 2018 Tristan Handy

I just went through the process of converting 25,000 lines of SQL from Redshift to Snowflake. Here are my notes.

Tristan Handy 16 Mar 2018 March 16, 2018 Tristan Handy

This is a very stupid problem. I am not writing this post because it’s a fascinating topic—rather, I’m writing it in the hopes that you avoid the headaches I've gone through.

Tristan Handy 29 Jan 2018 January 29, 2018 Tristan Handy

I got this question on my last post. It is a good one, and one that I’ve gotten a bunch of times over the past year and a half. This post is my attempt to answer it.

Tristan Handy 16 Jan 2018 January 16, 2018 Tristan Handy

dbt and Looker were built with the same ethos: analysts should be working in code.

Tristan Handy 2 Jan 2018 January 2, 2018 Tristan Handy

Frequently asked questions about Looker explores and how to design them very well.

Tristan Handy 11 Dec 2017 December 11, 2017 Tristan Handy

Modular analytics tools allow companies to choose components to fit their needs and switch out or augment components as their needs change. Here's what I think is missing from the market.

Tristan Handy 17 Oct 2017 October 17, 2017 Tristan Handy

dbt (data build tool) enables data analysts and engineers to transform data in their warehouses.

Tristan Handy 11 Sep 2017 September 11, 2017 Tristan Handy

This post is one of the first things that new employees read upon joining our team.

Tristan Handy 4 Jul 2017 July 4, 2017 Tristan Handy

dbt, our open source product for data modeling, is SQL-only. SQL can, by itself, accomplish a majority of analytical (non-data science) workloads.

Tristan Handy 1 Jul 2017 July 1, 2017 Tristan Handy

Fishtown Analytics celebrates its one year anniversary today.

Tristan Handy 31 Mar 2017 March 31, 2017 Tristan Handy

You need analytics.

Tristan Handy 9 Mar 2017 March 9, 2017 Tristan Handy

Over the past nine months I’ve worked with over a dozen venture-funded startups to build out their internal analytics. In doing so, there’s a single SQL function that I have come to use surprisingly often.

Tristan Handy 18 Sep 2016 September 18, 2016 Tristan Handy

This post, originally published in 2016, was most recently updated in November 2017.

Tristan Handy 18 Sep 2016 September 18, 2016 Tristan Handy

Business intelligence tech has changed really dramatically over the past 3-4 years since the advent of cloud-based analytics databases.

Tristan Handy 13 Sep 2016 September 13, 2016 Tristan Handy

There’s a new small business that just opened up in Fishtown and it’s not a gin bar or artisanal coffee shop.

Tristan Handy 3 Aug 2016 August 3, 2016 Tristan Handy

Over the past three months I’ve been in the lab building Fishtown Analytics. There’s a lot of the company formation process that’s been fun for me. I love checklists, and treated the opening of this business as a really big one.

Tristan Handy 1 Aug 2016 August 1, 2016 Tristan Handy

Today is a big day. Today, Magento announced it has purchased RJMetrics. The RJMetrics product will form the foundation of Magento Analytics, giving Magento users powerful tools to analyze their customers’ behavior.

Tristan Handy 11 May 2016 May 11, 2016 Tristan Handy

When a software engineer starts on a new project, her first step is almost always to survey the ecosystem of open source software that exists in the problem space.

Tristan Handy 5 Apr 2016 April 5, 2016 Tristan Handy

Over the past year, I and the folks at RJMetrics have had the opportunity to observe, and participate in, a significant evolution of the analytics ecosystem. The center of gravity in mature analytics organizations has shifted away from proprietary, end-to-end tools towards more composable solutions.