Ashish Alex

senior data engineer · london

Analytics / Data Engineer with six years of experience in building production ELT pipelines on BigQuery and AWS Redshift at billions-of-rows scale with dbt and Dataform. I have also shipped an AI assistant that answers business questions in plain English using MCPs leveraging data in data warehouses. Author of Dataform Tools, the VS Code extension officially recommended by Google. Have multiple open source contributions to Dataform Core and GitLab developer Tools. Earlier industry roles were held alongside doctoral research at Queen Mary University of London.

Read my resume ↓GitHub LinkedInEmail

Dataform Tools installs: 38K
PRs merged into Dataform: 14
research citations: 88

§ 01

Resume

Two pages, typeset in Typst from the same source I send to employers. Links in the preview are clickable.

Download PDF ↓Open ↗

§ 02

Dataform Tools

Recommended by Google's Dataform team Dataform Tools gives analytics engineers compile diagnostics, go-to-definition across the model graph, dry runs and cost estimates in the editor, so mistakes surface before code reaches the warehouse.

I started it in May 2024 and still ship it regularly. The latest release is v1.12.13.

VS Code installs: 9.2K
Open VSX downloads: 29K
GitHub stars: 94

what users say

5.0★ from 9 Marketplace reviews

Great work Ashish. Made my day to day development very easy. As a developer it is very hard to maintain the code and experiment in the dataform ui. This extension helped me a lot for developing in local within my VS Code
@nani_chey · Buy Me a Coffee · Aug 2026
Wow this tool is incredible. It requires very little in the way of setup as long as you already have `gcloud` configured on your local machine. It can almost completely replace the web interface, while providing easy visualizations of the data (via `Preview` functionality) and supporting the dependency graphs that are so useful.
Curtis Dean · VS Code Marketplace · May 2026
I've always wanted to develop my Dataform workflows in an IDE, and this extension makes that possible by providing all the essential UI features, as well as improvements to those features. Love it.
Clay Porter · Open VSX · Mar 2026

+ show all 20

It is very helpful. It doesn't support .ipynb files yet but it is a very recent upgrade from dataform open source project
grok · VS Code Marketplace · Dec 2025
Thanks for fixing the issue. I hope this great tool keeps going strong for a long time.
A supporter · Buy Me a Coffee · Nov 2025
I am very grateful for the tool you created. I am amazed by its very high quality/completion.
Oiki · Buy Me a Coffee · Nov 2025
Awesome tool. It makes Claude Code usable within Dataform.
Ivan Histand · Buy Me a Coffee · Sept 2025
Thanks, Ashish, for building this extension - it's enabled our team to carry on with the work despite the challenges
Modita · Buy Me a Coffee · Sept 2025
Thanks for building this and making it so much easier to work on dataform.
Krishna Bollojula · Buy Me a Coffee · Sept 2025
Thanks for the Bugfix of multiple file running
Benny · Buy Me a Coffee · Aug 2025
The must-have extension for anyone working with Dataform. Plusi, the developer is super responsive and helpful.
saghatelian · Open VSX · Aug 2025
Thanks for your work on this project. (Especially the results bug you jumped on so fast. :-)
Philip Eoute · Buy Me a Coffee · Jun 2025
thank you for making the dataform development experience much better
A supporter · Buy Me a Coffee · Apr 2025
Highly recommended. Until this there has not been any tools available that would qualify as a BQ IDE, this is only DataForm, not BQ primary, but still it's the way to go if you're using DataForm to manage your BQ Code (Also highly recommended) I need to find a way to send Ashish some $ he definitely deserves it.
Ivan Histand · VS Code Marketplace · Apr 2025
Amazing helpful set of tools. I've been waiting for something like this since Google's preview release of Dataform 2 years ago.
Landon Perkins · VS Code Marketplace · Mar 2025
Makes our lives with dataform much better
alexjoman · Buy Me a Coffee · Nov 2024
Makes working in Dataform much, much better than the awful UI. Really great extension!!
Alexander Joman · VS Code Marketplace · Nov 2024
Great Extension. QoL is improved compared to DataForm UI
Hampus Bergdahl · VS Code Marketplace · Nov 2024
Very good, much improved workflow compared to Dataform UI.
Mario Zumbühl · VS Code Marketplace · Nov 2024
Very very Cool Ashish, awesome inspiration
Kanmi Odutola · VS Code Marketplace · May 2024

a short tour

Dataform Tools — compiled query & dry run

Compiled query & dry run in Dataform Tools

Compiled SQL side by side with the .sqlx, with bytes processed and cost for every target, including incremental variants.

dataformtools.com VS Code Marketplace Open VSX Source on GitHub

§ 03

Open source contributions

pull requests merged into Google's Dataform

Building the extension kept leading me into Dataform's own CLI, so I fixed things upstream. These are some of them:

Sept 2026fix: cli compile time increased by ~4x#2300Fixed a regression that had made CLI compiles about four times slower.
Jan 2026feat: add support for service account impersonation#2001Added service account impersonation to the CLI.
Jun 2025feat: display bytes billed in actions metadata#1971Surfaced bytes billed in action metadata, so each run shows what it cost.
Mar 2025feat: show bigquery jobId when executing the job#1949Printed the BigQuery job ID for every executed action.
Jul 2024feat: vscode extension, more intutive compile errors#1775More intuitive compile errors, from the first round of VS Code work.

+ show all 21 merged upstream PRs

dataform-co/dataform · 14

harrisoncramer/gitlab.nvim · 2

hiracky16/dataform-osmosis · 2

kndndrj/nvim-dbee · 2

andres-lowrie/vim-sqlx · 1

Aug 2023Syntax highlighting for table names enclosed in backticks (``) & LIMIT keyword#2

synced from GitHub on 2026-09-23

Command-line tools

§ 04

Research papers

From my doctoral research at Queen Mary University of London (2019–2022) on speech enhancement, source separation and data augmentation. Google Scholar: 88 citations, h-index 3.