Isaac Kunen

Isaac Kunen

Professionally, I’ve built Snowflake’s Snowpark, Tableau Prep, SQL Server’s geospatial support, and more. Recently, I’ve been learning physics at the UW and teaching at North Seattle College.

Personally, I’m a father, a husband, a cellist, a photographer, and a tinkerer.

All opinions expressed here are mine alone: you can’t have them.

A leopard can’t change his spots. (But he may change jobs.)

1 minute read

I won't bury the lede: My last day at Tableau was July 6th, and tomorrow I start a new gig at Snowflake.

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I joined Tableau in June of 2015, and spent most of my three years there starting, building, and ultimately shipping Tableau Prep. I'm incredibly proud of the Prep team, the product we put together, and the awesome functionality yet to come.

As I move on, I've been thinking a bit about the past projects that really excited me. In addition to Prep, my favorites were probably StreamInsight, which was a system for dealing with time-aware queries and streaming data, and the spatial types in SQL Server. (Those types are still going strong and motivating new integrations ten years later.)

A common theme through of all of these projects has been making it easy to do complex things with data. And Snowflake is most certainly out to do that with data warehousing. It feels like a wonderful match.

I'm going to miss Tableau — it's a wonderful company — and I'm going to miss Prep. But I'm incredibly excited to be starting at Snowflake. (And a special thanks to those Preppies that slipped Snowflake support into the latest Prep release. That should save me some awkward moments.)

I'll try to keep writing here — maybe with a broader set of topics, and hopefully with a bit more regularity. So do please check in and drop me a note.

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