rubyaustralia/rubyconfau-2014-cfp — pull request #96 by vonconrad (2013-11-04 10:19:05+00:00)
Title: It's business time: How to metric

You can't put a price on data. Great data tells stories about your customers and serve to inform or reinforce the decisions you make about your product. Great data should be readily available, easy to consume and be able to answer any question you want to throw at it.

The problem is that the applications we build are not well-suited for exposing data. What starts with a few SQL queries quickly turns many. More and more requirements come in, and by now you've written Ruby code to build reports. Then you need to put it in the UI so non-developers can access it whenever they want to. Maybe you have business intelligence people accessing your production data directly. However hard you try, tech debt quickly accumulates, making it difficult to change either your database or the reports you've created.

There's a better way. Let me show you how.