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Hi friends,

I promised you that I would get the newsletter out each week, even if I wasn't able to hit publish on an article. Well - no article this week.

To make up for it, I've stuffed extra Curated Columns in here. The theme - leverage.

Curated Columns

​Benn Stancil's Response - Benn shared a few blurbs on last week's Data's Secret Sauce article. He quickly teased out a difference between metrics/reporting and research/analysis - improvisation. I like his visual of learning to be a great analyst from recipes would be like someone trying to become a great jazz artist with only sheet music.

I'm not fully convinced of his point. I believe we switch between modes of creative improv and laying a track... but more on that another time.

​Robots and Bicycles - This article made a distinction I had an intuitive feeling for, but would not have been able to express clearly. Robots take care of tasks for you. Bicycles enhance your ability to do a task. Both have their place, but it's important for you to understand which one your tool is filling. I'd argue ETL tools like Fivetran/Stitch & Hightouch/Census are robots. Mode/Hex/Looker are clearly bikes - helping us deliver on the core value provided by data professionals. dbt is fuzzier to me. When I'm building a new pipeline, dbt empowers me through jinja functions and defining tests - bicycle! Yet, once that pipeline is merged into main and dbt Cloud takes over, I do not need to think about it again - robot... Where do you think dbt belongs? What other tools/activities would be fun to put through this mental model?

​The Reorganization of the Factory - Erik Bernhardsson explores the economics behind the insatiable demand for software. Hopefully it's not much of a leap to apply this thinking to our data space. My takeaway was a lesson on leverage. We are gaining leverage from old hard problems being solved. That's not to say things are easy now, it's just a different kind of hard.

​Naval's Thread on Leverage - About 3/4ths of the way into this thread Naval breaks out 3 types of leverage (capital, labor, and zero-marginal cost assets). Capital and labor are permissioned leverage. Code and media are permissionless leverage. As analytics engineers, we turn our company's business logic and decision making into code, adding a force multiplier behind an analysis.

​Always Do Extra - If you're able to carve out some time for yourself while on job, what do you do? Nothing, More, or Extra? Ben Northrop would encourage you to do extra and I agree. Double Ben endorsement! Finding time to do extra keeps works engaging and opens up new opportunities. Right now, my extra is learning Terraform.

​Peacetime CEO / Wartime CEO - I'm not a CEO, but market changes push CEOs into a peacetime or wartime mindset. That mindset becomes the tone for how the entire company operates. So is the analytics market at peace or at war currently? Is the Modern Data Stack at peace with each other but at war against legacy providers? What about your business? Is it at peace or war and how is that impacting your plans to increase your data team's capabilities?

I believe we are at peace - and during peacetime the pie is growing enough for everyone. So remember to share your stories and it'll keep expanding the pie.

Data Doodle

A Katie Bauer thread inspired this week's doodle. When you find an insight in a new data set, you're unsure if the idea is brilliant, idiotic, or indifferent. That's why you need a sanity check from a buddy.

While we are on the topic of doodles - did you see there will be a SQL Draw event at the Coalesce conference? Be sure to register for the event and I look forward to seeing your art.

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