The growth of analytics has accelerated the use of SQL as a first class language. It has also grown the amount of collaboration involved in writing and maintaining SQL queries. With collaboration comes the inevitable variation in how queries are written, both structurally and stylistically which can lead to a significant amount of wasted time and energy during code review and employee onboarding. Alan Cruickshank was feeling the pain of this wasted effort first-hand which led him down the path of creating SQLFluff as a linter and formatter to enforce consistency and find bugs in the SQL code that he and his team were working with. In this episode he shares the story of how SQLFluff evolved from a simple hackathon project to an open source linter that is used across a range of companies and fosters a growing community of users and contributors. He explains how it has grown to support multiple dialects of SQL, as well as integrating with projects like DBT to handle templated queries. This is a great conversation about the long detours that are sometimes necessary to reach your original destination and the powerful impact that good tooling can have on team productivity.