We decided to catch up with Ben Jones, Lead Analytics Engineer at Capital on Tap, to chit-chat about, well, ourselves.

How would you describe your team?

If the data warehouse is the company’s library, the people in my team are the librarians. Or maybe a more intriguing comparison: The Citadel and its Maesters? Jokes aside, we know what everything means, how to store it, and where to find it. My team operates very much at the core of the company, working with all the other teams at Capital on Tap.

What challenges were you facing when choosing Paradime?

We previously used another cloud based solution, but as our team grew, the need for a tool that could help us scale grew too. With a growing Analytics Team and more people from outside the team now contributing, we started to look for a new seamless, cost-effective, and flexible platform to help us organise, manage, and monitor our dbt™ usage, and to help us make sure the data and code we maintain are high-quality, of course.

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How is Paradime helping your team?

1. Running dbt™ at scale - Declarative paradime_schedules.yml

So, a way of declaring what we want to run in code rather than in the UI. A feature like this makes our lives much easier when trying to run dbt™ at scale, especially with multiple users involved. It gives us the flexibility we need to maintain and monitor our dbt™ schedules - minus the headaches and sleepless nights. In essence, it brings us peace of mind, which is well-needed in our line of work.

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2. Bridging communication gaps - Slack Integration

That we can send alerts in any Slack channel is brilliant - the devil is in the details. Compared to the competitors we looked into, this is something that is included already in Paradime’s base tier. This function saves my team precious time as we can send the alerts to several different Slack channels, helping us bridge the communication gap with other departments, such as the Finance or Credit teams. This feature also lets us personalise the communication experience and reduces time spent in the different channels. A win-win for every team!

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3. Quality-proofing when running fast(er) - The API

Initially, we didn’t use our previous cloud based solution’s API much, but now with Paradime, some people in the team are using the API to set up continuous development pipelines. The CI and CD capabilities in Paradime are remarkably user-friendly, and it ensures that we are not producing bad code or breaking pipelines. Essentially, it helps us quality-proof the work while also speeding up the the entire process. I also want to mention how helpful Fabio (co-founder of Paradime) has been. He helps my team review code and provides technical support on how to get the most out of the Paradime platform.