Tyler Rouze
About
My journey in data started all the way back in college where I studied Industrial Engineering. One of the core topics you learn in this program is mathematical optimization, where we often use data files as inputs to model constraints on these kinds of problems! Since then, I've been a data analyst on both small and large teams, and more recently a consultant shepherding our firm's dbt-based projects towards success. Since joining the dbt Community, I've spoken at the Chicago dbt Meetup, Coalesce (a milestone for my career!), dbt's Data Leaders Series, and even made open source contributions to `dbt-core`! It has been the joy of my career to be a part of this vibrant community.
When did you join the dbt community and in what way has it impacted your career?
I joined the dbt community a few years back, and if you've seen me speak you'll know that discovering dbt was a very "lightbulb on" moment for me as a data analyst in a past life. Making the data transformation process more visible and accessible to less technical backgrounds made a lot of sense to me, data analysts understand best how to derive value from your organization's data!
While I do still get to be hands-on with dbt, I now spend more of my time thinking about architecting dbt implementations and building analytics teams around it. The beautiful thing about this industry is that we've made great strides in solving our technical problems, the biggest challenges we now face are more socio-technical and process-based which is just as interesting to me!
What dbt community leader do you identify with? How are you looking to grow your leadership in the dbt community?
Leadership is a weird thing because you don't really realize you are a leader until you've been performing "leadership activities" for a while, so I'm honestly not sure what kind of leader I am yet. I made a commitment to myself a while back to share and talk about the things I was working on publicly in the event that someone else might find it useful, and hopefully had ideas of their own to offer me. The benefit of this is that it opens up a dialogue for our industry to evolve our best practices over time. If you've seen me speak, it's not uncommon for me to posit ideas during the talks I've given that aren't fully developed. My hope is that through a little bit of vulnerability others will feel that there's a place for them to share what they're working on and thinking about too, regardless of how polished it is!
What have you learned from community members? What do you hope others can learn from you?
In similar thinking to the kind of leadership I try to exemplify, I've found that the more I give to the community, the more I get in return. Contributing to the dbt Community has given me the ability to have numerous conversations with other practitioners about the problems they face in their role and how they've solved them, which in turn makes me better at my job. There is so much we can learn from others, but someone has to start the conversation!