Episode 19
Deeply Unsexy: SQL's Redemption Arc — with Tristan Handy
dbt Labs CEO Tristan Handy drops into The Test Set to map the fault lines between the data science world and the enterprise data world — and explain why analytics engineers are basically pissed-off data analysts who decided to organize the bookshelf. We get into SQL's glow-up, the community magic of dbt Slack, what AI agents mean for data warehouses, and why everyone's building iOS apps with Claude now.
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EPISODE NOTES
Tristan Handy (CEO, dbt Labs) joins Michael Chow and Hadley Wickham to talk analytics engineering, SQL's surprising expressiveness, building communities without gatekeeping, and how AI is reshaping data pipelines. Plus: edible gardening as a hedge against digital dysphoria.
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What's Inside:
- What analytics engineers *actually* do
- SQL's journey from deeply unsexy to indispensable
- How dbt turned source control into a source of truth
- Building a tech community without the RTFM energy
- AI agents on your data lake: permissions get personal
- Will LLMs kill the open-source package ecosystem?
- Edible gardening, welding dreams, and digital dysphoria
HOSTS & GUESTS
Principal Software Engineer, Posit
Michael Chow
Chief Scientist, Posit
Hadley Wickham
Principal Architect, Posit
Wes McKinney
CEO & Founder, dbt Labs
Tristan Handy