🐰 Designing great Dashboards, Breaking Productive Databases, DBT Coding Conventions; ThDPTh #15 🐰
How to design great dashboards, why breaking your productive system makes it more robust and the DBT coding conventions.
Data will power every piece of our existence in the near future. I collect “Data Points” to help understand & shape this future.
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(1)🔮 Chaos Toolkit
Chaos Engineering means breaking things in production to make them more resilient and better. The key idea is that test/stage systems are not similar enough to the production system to test out everything. Sounds like a crazy concept, but NetFlix very convincingly uses this exact idea to improve their systems day in and day out.
Data: so what? I find the idea of chaos engineering appealing to data teams because of the stark distinction between “staging systems” and production systems in the data world. Think about it, do you have a copy of your production data in your “staging system”? Do you run load tests on your BI tools that simulate the internal real traffic? Do you run a bunch of crazy test SQLs as the actual users do? The ones that usually keep hanging in your production DB? Usually, the answer to all of these questions is no.
And yet these systems are immensely important. So I do believe a little chaos engineering can help make these systems much more robust.
The chaos toolkit is a great framework because it’s written in python, a language most data teams are familiar with and it’s extensible. I also found it much easier to use than the “Simian Army”. So go, check it out and write a few experiments to break stuff!
Chaos Engineering Experiment Automation
The simplest and easiest way to explore building your own Chaos Engineering Experiments.
(2) 🔥 DBT Coding Conventions
I share the dbt coding conventions for two reasons. For one I think everyone should have their own set of conventions, even if they just refer to other conventions for working with data. Second these conventions are really good, but concise. They deal with both, dbt a great T-only tool, and SQL. The SQL coding conventions really bring quite a bit of programming best practices into the world of SQL like focusing on having one CTE do just one thing, make them easy to debug, comment on them etc.
To add to the first point, I find the idea of open-sourcing coding conventions a great idea because you share knowledge, but you also put up pressure to actually adhere to them and keep them up to date. Besides, it’s a great advertisement for the company itself. In this case, fishtown analytics also chose to open-source their employee handbook which has a very similar effect I guess.
corp/dbt_coding_conventions.md at master · fishtown-analytics/corp · GitHub
Assets related to the operation of Fishtown Analytics. - fishtown-analytics/corp
(3) 😍 Good Dashboards Inform, Great Ones Align
I don’t think dashboards are dead, but one thing is certain, it’s very easy to produce bad dashboards.
The post makes a few good points: dashboards are there to make people smart, which means to help them make great decisions. But a lot of dashboards are also there to inform like the typical “sales reporting”.
But they don’t have to be there only to inform. Indeed, the author makes a good point when he says that the mere presence of the stuff on the board actually makes the stuff on the board important. Using this mechanism you can create alignment just by crafting great dashboards that focus on the few important (truly important!) key indicators and contexts. The article showcases a couple of good examples, so check them out if you’re in the mood to build a few good dashboards.
Good Dashboards Inform. Great Dashboards Align. | Nightingale
The Aligning Effects of Visualizing Team Performance. Dashboards aren’t just for informing big decisions. There’s another overlooked benefit: Alignment.
🎄 In Other News & Thanks
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