Collect, Cultivate, Grow

Data Gardeners is focused on building competencies in designing, building, and deploying data products and platforms. We focus on three broad areas:

• Data team building, coaching, and guidance
• Data system architectural review, requirements capturing, and scaling
• Code-level technical challenges related to ETL, data systems, and product performance

Whether you are looking to build a new data system from scratch or optimize your existing systems, our expertise and experience are there to help you achieve your goals. We have lived and worked with a wide range of types and scales of data. We are comfortable working with everything from CSV files and spreadsheets to billions of rows of cloud based column stores. We have supported business operations from scrappy product development to billion dollar public company shareholder calls. And we’ve integrated it all. What we’ve learned is that while requirements change, there are common elements shared as companies grow and evolve. Sadly, one of these elements is the difficulty faced with trying to leverage data effectively. All too often, data becomes unruly and a burden instead of providing insight and support. Data Gardeners' focus is to help companies tame and prune the wild data landscape into one that provides the insight required.

Dana and Ben are the co-founders of Data Gardeners. They have worked together in multiple roles within the Shopify Data organization for over 7 years. Ben is a data scientist with extensive experience in modeling and ETL development, while Dana is a data engineer with experience in building and maintaining data platforms and tools for data analysts. Together, their skill sets cover the on-the-ground expertise required for running and managing data platforms, transforming data to answer tough questions, and working with the human side of the equation to get the most out of your data.

Hi I’m Ben. I’ve worn many hats over the years as a data scientist and engineer. From designing optical networks at Nortel to building the financial models that took Shopify public. I’ve learned that the best results come from letting the people with deep domain knowledge focus on the work and not the technology and process. Whether it be automation, business intelligence or domain modeling I’d really like to work with your team to understand the unique challenges you face.

Hi I’m Dana. My role in Data Gardeners is the technical and data team building/coaching aspect of what we offer. I’ve worked across data engineering departments from server/cloud infrastructure - Hadoop running Map Reduce and Apache Spark to frontend data applications and visualization. From debugging distributed systems, cluster hard-disk writes, and networking issues to supporting scientists transform and query data. On the human side of data, I’ve successfully started and rebuilt teams which is a challenge I’ve particularly enjoyed. I look forward to bringing a systems view of data teams and code to support solving your needs.