Everyone SQLs You are a data analyst. Or maybe you are a product manager, engineer, or marketer. You’ve probably written SQL to pull data to understand the state of the product and business.

And why we need to rethink business intelligence — As data analysts, we waste too much time on making dashboards for other people and not enough time on answering deep questions about critical business issues. This is a waste of resources for the individual, and a waste of resources for the business. The real meaty questions about the business such as: “what contributed to the sudden growth in revenues last month?” cannot be answered by a generic dashboard with revenue and traffic numbers. You need to do a deep dive into the problem. You need to unravel the question into specific queries.

With Prequel.ai, adding context to everything in your data stack is a breeze 💨 — The science lab analogy Imagine a science lab that has a bunch of test tubes with all sorts of technically sophisticated biological experiments (I’m talkin’ CRISPR, immuno-oncology, mRNA therapeutics). Now imagine that none of the test tubes have any labels, so you don’t know the context of any of the experiments. Does this sound…

Robert Yi, Ph.D. Where are you based? San Mateo, CA Tell us a fun fact about yourself. I really like mechanical keyboards. How did you get into your field? Tell us your story. I became a data scientist after my Ph.D. program at MIT. I ended up getting into data science when a coworker prodded me to switch from MATLAB to python, and it all went downhill from there. How do you use data at work? In the past, I’d say I’m…

Keeping the main thing the main thing One of my favorite aphorisms in management and technology: keep the main thing the main thing. It’s a succinct reminder that we all get carried away by unimportant time-suck from time to time. If I’m being honest, I get carried away the majority of the time. …

(Promo: Join our lifetime membership for $100) The All-In-One Workspace for Data Analysts Today, I’m excited to announce our invite-only release of Prequel.ai, the first all-in-one workspace for data analysts. Prequel.ai brings queries, docs, and metadata to a single workspace. We built Prequel.ai to address two decades of frustration around data productivity at data-driven companies such…

Or why a consolidation is coming your way — My take: the current tools to work with data in the market are ineffective and will face a wave of consolidation. Why? There are too many tools, and these tools are not great. Read on to learn more.👇 Problem 1/ there are too many tools 🤯 We analysts are using a half dozen different tools to get…

One of the most important aspects of data science and data engineering is understanding and managing the context of the disparate data assets in an organization. Data context 🔎 is about using the right data for the right purpose. Using the right data for the right purpose is generally more…

As I get ready to turn the pages on the second chapter of my life and get ready for my 30's, I wanted to lay out some of my learnings from my 20's. My 20's passed on by so much more quickly than I had imagined, and I suspect that…