Carragee Consulting

Over the past 18 months Ethan Aaron has become a friend of mine and many many others.

He and Portable are building thousands of data connectors between the long tail of SaaS applications. They are enabling just the “E” and “L” part of the ExtractTransformLoad process.

My first thought knowing they could populate data into standard schemas from SaaS tools was, “why are they not attaching templates for BI like the accelerators on Tableau Public?”

Well, thankfully, that niche is still available to anyone who wants to make their living translating data into dashboards!

Data extraction via API seems like it should be easy. Just get it from A and load it to B, right?

No. I’ve seen the writing and testing of custom APIs hang up pricing projects for months.

As an analyst or data scientist there is nothing better than working with an excellent data engineer and with a business stakeholder who can clearly defined the business objectives.

In this podcast Ethan:
– explains that the connectors they offer handle schema definition, authentication and pagination, etc
– discusses the inherent risk of relying on open source
– build vs buy trade off of internal custom development (when your internal knowledge walks)

He talks about Portable and their product, but he also addresses core issues facing the data world.

The thing about Ethan is he’s all about connecting: not just data, but people and ideas and opportunities. I hope I get to eventually go to one of the low key data happy hours he hosts. In fact, there’s one today in Santa Cruz hosted by Bytewax and Matt Palmer partly because of the ones Ethan made popular in NYC.

I always find it valuable to hear Ethan’s perspective and I look forward to the next guest Jeremy Paytas introduces us to on his show Data in Chief.