Favorite Tools from Howl’s Stack
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In addition to common tools like Slack, JIRA, Github and Google Workspace, my employer Howl has a couple of tools which I find extremely valuable (amongst the sea of countless tools.)
Git Integration for Jira links issues to branches when the branch name contains the issuekey. This helps answer the question “what code changes came from this ticket?” which is useful for tracking down why a change was made, or for determining how progress on a ticket is going without bugging the developer.
Go links with Trotto (e.g. http://go/foo) make memorable links for important stuff. In a remote first world there’s a sea of links, and go links really help make things accessible. The mental strain of remembering a substring of a URL or the thread/message/whatever in which it was posted, is replaced with intuitive short links like go/sql (which in our case brings you to the SQL Runner UI)
1Password is just another password manager, but it’s functional and having one is indispensable.
Data
Looker is the best BI tool I’ve ever used. I think the flow of Dashboard –> Tile –> Look/Explore –> SQLRunner is a great way to consume data, flowing from highly opinionated to raw.
FiveTran excels at moving data around and can be cheap if you avoid data sources with frequent updates. “If it doesn’t dashboard, it doesn’t matter” is the approach I’m taking for building out our data culture, and FiveTran makes it easy to plumb third-party tools into our data warehouse.
Storing data in AWS (S3) and loading with Snowflake (Snowpipe) is a simple pattern to build data pipelines around