Spectacles

?? New Looker-Focused Webinar Series! Hi everyone! We’re excited to announce our new Looker-focused webinar series. Every two weeks we’ll be getting together to do a deep dive into some area of Looker and analytics. They will be scheduled for Wednesdays at 12pm ET. Each session will be recorded so you can also watch it in your own time if you can’t make the session. The idea for the sessions is to regularly get the Looker community together in the same place and talk about actual hands-on experience with Looker. If you have something that you would be interested in presenting, we would love to hear from you! ?? Our first session will be on November 30th. We’ll be talking about?How To Fix Your LookML Project Structure, including how to use refinements to keep your code DRY and manageable. You can register for the webinar?with the link in the comments. ?? We’ve got the next five webinars already scheduled. You can always see all upcoming webinars on?this page. The topics include: * Managing Multi-Instance Looker Deployments (with James Torre from Bytecode IO, Inc) * Linting LookML with LAMS and lkmlstyle (with Infinite Lambda) * An Introduction to the Looker API * Optimising Cost and Speed using BigQuery and Looker (with Philipp Heinrich at DoiT International) Looking forward to seeing you all there! #webinar #looker #analytics

Very excited to be hosting our last London Analytics Engineering Meetup of the year this Thursday at Wise's London office! We have fantastic talks lined up from Jonny Dungay from PrimaryBid and Deckel de Lange from Wise. Somewhat unusually we still have a few stops going for the event, so make sure to sign-up at the link in the comments and join us for a great evening of talks and networking! See you there ??

Keeping LookML in sync with your warehouse is a constant headache. Even with tools like Spectacles to highlight when things will break, you still need to go and make the change in LookML most times you change the warehouse schema. This is why Mariana Fernandes and the team at GetGround have build Optician, a Python package to automate the generation of LookML. This has allowed them to keep development speed high without compromising on the quality and reliability of their content in Looker. I'm really excited to have Mariana joining us for our webinar next Wednesday. She's going to walk through how they built the tool and provide a live demo. Make sure to join us! Link in comments to sign up!

Feeling overwhelmed by the jargon around LLMs? ?? Terms like RAG, embeddings, fine-tuning, and tokenization can be daunting, but they don’t have to be—especially when it comes to using LLMs in analytics. Imagine breaking down these complex concepts and gaining a solid understanding of how LLMs can transform your analytics. With a little demystification, you’ll see just how accessible and powerful these tools can be for building your own solutions. The team at Bytecode IO has been leading the way, crafting top-notch LLM solutions for their clients. Their work has set a new standard in the industry, demonstrating the real-world impact of LLMs on analytics. I’m thrilled to announce that Amanda Kuelker will be joining our webinar this Wednesday. She’ll break down the essentials, including fine-tuning (a.k.a. training) an LLM and leveraging Looker to generate training and example data swiftly. Don’t miss out! Register now via the link in the comments.

We're excited to announce that Spectacles integrates with paradime.io. If you're a Paradime user, you can automatically kick off Spectacles tests whenever you make dbt changes. We'll be demoing the integration on our next webinar (link in the comments). Join us!

Super excited to see the release of this new integration from paradime.io! Paradime provides a first-class development experience for dbt and it's awesome to be able to partner with them to provide end-to-end testing across dbt and Looker, by far their most popular stack! Data is all about trust and continuous integration is a key pillar of that trust. With tools like Paradime and Spectacles, it's no longer complicated to set up sophisticated data tests for every step in your pipeline. Want a demo of the integration? Join us for our live webinar next Wednesday where we'll show you exactly how it works! Registration link in the comments. See you there!

Exciting news! ?? paradime.io is now fully integrated with Spectacles, marking the start of an incredible partnership. Flashback to 2018: I first met Dylan Atlas-Baker in a café, where he introduced me to the magic of #dbt. Fast forward to today, and we've come full circle, joining forces to revolutionize data workflows. It's been incredible working with Dylan and Josh. For teams leveraging #Looker, Paradime, and Spectacles, every pull request now packs a powerful punch ??: 1?? Paradime delivers column-level lineage diff for Looker, revealing the true impact of dbt changes. 2?? Spectacles brings automated testing and validation of LookML to the table. The result? Unmatched visibility into your entire #dbt + #Looker platform. Ready to supercharge your data game? Let's connect and tune in to our joint #livestream next week to see this in action! ???? #DataAnalytics #BusinessIntelligence #TechPartnership

Complete CI for dbt + Looker with the new Paradime Spectacles integration Ensuring comprehensive test coverage is essential for maintaining the integrity of your data pipeline. When multiple tools are involved, like dbt and Looker, this gets all the more complicated. Luckily, Paradime and Spectacles have got you covered! Paradime’s new Looker + Spectacles integration provides end-to-end test coverage for dbt and Looker, addressing the need for robust testing and validation across your data stack. This powerful combination ensures that your data is accurate and reliable from development to production. In this session, we’ll demo the integration, explore its development process, and discuss how it enhances data integrity and testing in Looker. Learn from the experts and discover how to leverage this integration to improve your data workflow. Bring your questions for the Q&A session and see how you can achieve comprehensive test coverage for your dbt and Looker setup. See you there!

Stale data has a bad smell. You load a dashboard and you think to yourself that something is off, but you aren't quite sure how. This is an experience that anyone who has consumed data from a BI tool can relate to and the data team at Canva have come up with an absolutely awesome solution: They have developed an ingenious alerting system to add alert banners to dashboards during data incidents. The second they know data is stale or "off" in some way, they can alert the data consumer exactly where they want to be notified: in the dashboards themselves. I'm really excited to have Michael Letheby and Jonathan Rogers joining our webinar next week to walk us through the system they've developed. They'll discuss how they designed the system and show it off with a live demo. Make sure to join us! Registration link is in the comments. See you there! ?? Wednesday July 24th ? 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm GMT (The photo for this post and the webinar inspired by the Beacon Hills of Gondor... IYKYK I guess...)

You won't want to miss this one. The team at Canva have done some clever hacking of Looker dashboard tiles to display dynamic alerts for common problems like data staleness. We love sharing creative solutions like these from Looker teams in the trenches!