2023 is almost done and dusted! The team shipped some incredible new updates and features in December, continuing to tick off our customers' wish lists at a rapid pace. It's been a surreal year for Paradime - for product, go-to-market, and engineering. In this post, we will share the latest updates, a few 2023 highlights, and round it off with a 2024 teaser.

---

Content

- Shipped in December

- 2023 wrapped

- What to expect in 2024

---

Shipped in December 🛠️

Bolt

UI-based Schedules

One of the most significant updates this year is our steaming hot release of UI-based schedules. By using a very simple form, our users can now create a scheduled dbt™ job in less than a minute. The form is built with safeguards to minimize user errors. With a few clicks, users can deploy and start running new schedules.

Alongside creating new schedules, our users can:

• Edit an existing schedule
• Copy or duplicate an existing schedule, and
• Delete a schedule

Paradime users now have unmatched flexibility to author their production dbt™ jobs.

Git-tracked YAML-based schedules are great for jobs that:

• Are critical in the data pipeline
• Requires plenty of oversight
• Shouldn't be edited under normal course of business

UI-based schedules, on the other hand, are suitable for:

• Ad hoc runs
• Fixing data urgently in production
• Rapid testing and experimentation of a data pipeline
• Teams needing simplicity

Cron presets and recommendations

When defining jobs, we always have to define the schedule in cron format. However, cron format is not the easiest, and many analytics engineering practitioners still struggle with it. To make their lives easier, we are now introducing Cron Presets so users can quickly start with a preset and then modify it. It's much easier to start this way instead of a blank slate.

Alongside presets, we have added 'improvement recommendations' for when users specify certain cron configurations. Again, cron is challenging, and we wanted to make the experience less painful for everyone.

The new Bolt UI 🔥

In December, we shipped a new UI for interacting with Bolt Schedules and runs within a schedule.

Users can now:

• Search and filter using multiple criteria, such as statuses and crons
• Show/hide columns in the table
• Move columns around, and lastly
• Add columns that are hidden

In a nutshell, it is a complete 'interacting-with-table' UX, so users can customise what they see in only seconds.

This is a game-changer for data and analytics teams, and we are just getting started. While this is a significant unlock for our users, the table experience could be 10x better. Stay tuned...

Code IDE

New Toolbar and more space

When we first built the Paradime IDE, our panels for docs, lineage, and data preview were on the right side by default, and the terminal was at the bottom. By working even closer with our users, we realized this positioning was not optimal for data analytics. Users needed a wider space to see all the columns in a data preview, the upstream and downstream lineage.

From this release, the Paradime command panel has all the tools on the left and all the actions on the right. This makes the UI cleaner and more spacious to work on both small and big screens.

---

2023 wrapped 💪

Wow! We can't believe 2023 is over. The year has been nothing short of crazy, and we're immensely thankful to all our users, customers, and everyone we've had the opportunity to partner up with.

It's always hard to summarize such an eventful year, but let's try.

Platform

In 2023, we laid the foundation for a robust analytics engineering platform to support use cases such as multi-tenancy and data mesh. The most significant updates we shipped were:

• Paradime Workspaces - self-contained, isolated units where analysts do their work. Each workspace has its own users, repo, warehouse connections, integrations, and notifications.
• Global availability - in 2023, we added seven regions globally, where Paradime instances can be hosted.

Code IDE

We worked on making our Code IDE experience user-centric, intuitive, and smooth. While we are just getting started, some of the notable features we released were:

• Easy formatting & fixing dbt™ models and YAMLs using SQLFluff, Prettify, and YAML-validation powered by JSONSchema.
• Easy navigation through models with dbt™ Intellisense (Autocomplete, Go-to-definition, Peek definition), increasing productivity by up to 83%.
• Multi-engine dbt™ development with support for the DuckDB toolchain, including MotherDuck and Harlequin.sh, with the potential to slash cloud computing costs during development.
• Paradime Live V2 went, well, live. We built our advanced just-in-time dbt™ compiler from the ground up with near-real-time responses.
• Added support for third-party OSS CLIs like Lightdash, Elementary, and re_data for semantic layer, observability, and data quality.

Bolt and CI/CD

Bolt went mainstream in 2023. We implemented hundreds of incremental changes throughout the year to enhance Bolt's daily performance for every user. We released a few notable features and updates:

• Introduced UI-based schedules for users to create, edit, copy, and deploy production runs in minutes.
• Enabled users to search and filter schedules and runs using various parameters.
• Provided the ability to view and download logs, debug logs, and artefacts for each run.
• Implemented logs storage in either our S3 or the customer's S3 buckets.
• Facilitated CI/CD for Github and Azure DevOps through our TurboCI app.
• Introduced a column-level lineage diff in CI.
• Implemented Webhooks and APIs.
• Improved the speed of CI runs.
• Enhanced the speed of dbt™ compilation (speed is a priority at Paradime).
• Provided support for deferred schedules for production and CI runs, allowing deferral to production runs in the development environment.

Catalog

We released the Paradime Catalog, our one-stop shop for all your data docs. The most notable releases were:

• The Paradime Catalog app release. Paradime Catalog supports bi-directional sync with YAML. Users can document in UI, and Paradime writes back to YAML files in git-repo.
• OpenAI integration to write high-quality dbt™model docs in a single click.
• Additional data assets from integrations like Looker, Tableau, PowerBI, Fivetran, etc. Also available in the Catalog.
• Integration API to allow customers to bring their own integration into the Catalog.

SynQ

Many data teams struggle to collaborate with business functions, such as Marketing, and vice-versa. At Paradime, we have seen first-hand how cross-team collaboration can unlock immense value, so we decided to build and launch SynQ as an experiment to bridge communication gaps.

While in early beta, the SynQ Chrome plugin works as an extension with bi-directional sync with Slack and is integrated with Jira.

Think business-to-analyst conversations, annotations, triage, issue-tracking from a single place with Slack sync, and more.

We are still experimenting with the tool, but it has already given our early users a glimpse of the future of cross-team collaboration - seamless and straightforward. Try it today and let us know what would improve it, as we are building SynQ with our users.

Integrations

2023 was a huge year for us in terms of integration partnerships. Several customers told us they would never have expected, or even imagined, some of the integrations that now are live on the platform.

We added MotherDuck, DuckDB, Elementary, PowerBI, Tableau, Lightdash, re_data, Jira, Dagster, Fivetran, and dbt Cloud™ importer to our natively supported integrations.

We also built our Customer Integration API (currently in Private Preview) to allow customers to add their own integration to their Paradime instance.

---

So what's coming in 2024? 🎉

This year, we shipped a hell of a lot - it's pretty unreal if I say so myself.

Not only is the Paradime Platform faster than ever, but the Paradime Team has shown to be resilient, innovative, and risk-taking. It's every founder's dream, if you'd ask me. Our GTM squad is hungry, the engineers are rethinking innovation, and the design team is elevating every detail of the user experience.

When thinking of 2024, the top 3 high-level questions we will be asking ourselves are:

• How can we help our users be "orders of magnitude" efficient and bring real value to their broader organization?
• How can we do all the little things well (the devil is in the details) to bring MacOS joy to all our Paradime end-users?
• How can we support data and analytics teams with operational excellence, whether it be budget management or team collaboration?

In our quest to find answers to these questions, we will explore exciting new design ideas, GTM tactics, and engineering solutions. No one said it would be easy, but if there was one thing we learned in 2023, it's that we have the right team to make anything happen.

I want to thank all our customers for trusting us, everyone who has given us feedback, our investors and believers, and, finally, my team for excelling in such a challenging macro-environment. Thank you for never standing still and constantly moving the needle for what’s possible.

‍

2024, let's go!