Ahmed Elsamadisi

Hey there! I’m one of the co-founders and CEO of Narrator. Before I was the first hire on WeWork’s data team, built their data engineering infra and grew the team from zero to 40 people.

📍 New York, NY

Data Analysis

The Data Modeling Paradox: Are we sacrificing insights for structure?

While companies heavily rely on data to inform their strategies, the very data models they employ often hinder their ability to ask deep and insightful questions.

Data Engineering

Leaving Data Chaos Behind: A Paradigm Shift towards Activity-based Modeling

Explore a powerful approach that can revolutionize the way you understand and utilize data: modeling data as activities. Activities can bring clarity and organization to your data, allowing you to gain valuable insights and make the most of your data.

Data Engineering

How to calculate data warehouse cost and prevent it from exploding

A realistic way to estimate warehouse cost and techniques to prevent the warehouse cost from getting out of hand.

Data Engineering

The cost of product analytics data in your data warehouse

Syncing product analytics data into your warehouse is more expensive than you might think. This explains why, and what to do about it.

Data Analysis

What's missing from the Amplitude and Snowflake partnership

Amplitude and Snowflake's partnership is a great first pass at warehouse-powered data analytics. However, this sync is missing many data team requirements for a complex and secure production data system.

Forget about the product

Last week at Narrator, we did an interesting product thinking exercise that reminded me of the incredible value of constantly going back to the customer and reasoning from there, so I thought I’d share what it was and why it ended up being so valuable for us. Here’s

Data Analysis

A guide to data-driven prioritization for product managers

PMs use data to prioritize, align their team, and communicate the impact of their work. How does this work in practice?

Data Analysis

Using customer behavior to drive better product decisions

Understanding which customer behaviors lead to conversion is the fastest way to know which product changes to make. As a data person, I frequently get asked for help from product teams. Over the years, I spent quite a bit of time explaining the difference between good and bad questions. Typically

SQL

SQL Hack: How to join tables when the key is buried in a blob of text

The Situation Text blobs are a pain, but they are commonly used with data from email platforms, Salesforce, or dynamic UTMs. In these cases, the JOIN key is probably hidden in a blob of text. For example, say you want to join your users table using the user_id from

SQL

SQL Hack: How to get first value based on time without a JOIN or a Window Function?

This is my favorite trick in SQL! If you are like me and have been working with data for a while, you have googled “how to get the first value without a join or window function” multiple times in your life. We often hate having to write complex queries to

Top 10 Signs You Have a Data Modeling Problem

1. Your warehouse is really slow Situation > “I just hit Run Query. I am going to get a cup of coffee and hopefully it’s done when I get back.” — Data Analyst Problem * Every time a transformation runs in your warehouse, it drops and recreates every table, thus processing time