How I Built a Defining Millennial Songs App in Sigma
A few months ago, a friend sent me a link to an NPR Music podcast episode about identifying the defining Millennial song. Of course, no single song can define an entire group of people born within a 15-year span, but I really enjoyed pondering what might be the top songs. This came up right around […]
Bridging Transactional and Analytical Worlds with Snowflake Postgres
A B2B order fulfillment scenario. It’s common to build implementations around transactional systems: an application writing new records into a database, an event triggering an orchestration step or a stream of individual transactions landing somewhere to be processed being common examples of it. A question that comes up often is how these transactional systems interact […]
Trust, but Verify: Getting Better Data Analysis with Claude Cowork
Data Analysis questions are among the most common questions I see from clients on the Assist desk. Now that AI has entered the chat, so to speak, I get a lot of questions about using AI to analyze, clean and work with data to make the crunching of numbers, especially numbers contained in large and […]
BI as Code: Driving Sigma from the Command Line with Claude
Analytics teams have spent years bringing software-engineering discipline to the data warehouse: version control, code review, CI, automated tests. The layer that has stubbornly resisted that treatment is the presentation layer, the dashboards and reports themselves. They tend to live as opaque objects inside a BI tool, edited by hand and impossible to diff. In […]
How I Went From Analytics Consultant to Data Engineer
Honestly, if you asked me when my story started, I’d say it started when I was born. But if we’re being reasonable about it, the real answer is pre-K, playing Command & Conquer with my dad on our home PC. That’s one of my earliest memories, period, not just my earliest tech memory. I’ve been […]
Saying Goodbye to the Color Tool for Tableau
After more than a decade of service, we’re sunsetting the Color Tool for Tableau. If you built high-stakes Tableau dashboards in 2014, you remember the pain. Getting your brand colors into Tableau meant hand-editing XML in a preferences file, one hex code at a time. So, we built a fix. The Color Tool let you […]
AI Apps with Sigma: The Real Estate Calculator
Data teams have never had more to work with. Cloud warehouses handle scale that used to require infrastructure teams. AI models are accessible with a single API call. MCP servers, pre-built connectors and low-code platforms mean that stitching capabilities together has never been faster. The challenge is no longer access: It is knowing which tool […]
Nobody Likes Timesheets. We Built an AI Tool That Fills Them For You.
We replaced a seven-field form with a single sentence. Consultants type what they worked on — or import their Outlook calendar — and an AI assistant creates the time entry. The MVP was built in about 80 hours of development time using Claude Code, runs on Google Gemini, and is now used daily by 46 […]
Addicted to Arrays in Sigma
At the end of a long day, I was on zoom with my friend and coworker Austin. We were debating approaches to a feature where users could input scheduling for a forecasting app. Austin: But each time they start to input a row, that’s going to cost them credits… Me: Oh, I have an idea! Austin: You’re […]
Just Book Some Time Off: Building a Decision-Making Assistant with Snowflake Cortex Agents
Last post, I built a chatbot that could answer any question about the InterWorks employee handbook. It worked well. Ask about parental leave in Germany, get the actual policy, cited, instantly. But a few weeks in, I noticed something: most of the questions people actually want answered aren’t really about the policy. They’re about them. […]