Four Kitchens

Suzy Bates describes herself as a "project manager who loves SQL." She's Director of Projects at Four Kitchens, a digital agency that helps organizations with content strategy, content management, and multichannel publishing. She's also responsible for data analysis at the company, with occasional help from developers.

"We have internal business data in various tools," Bates says. "We built custom sync software to get it into our PostgreSQL data warehouse. We needed more solid connections that ran more often and would adjust with changing API data structures. And we were adding new tools that would require building a new sync. We realized it didn't make sense to build and maintain our own data integrations."

"We looked at several ETL tools. I was attracted to Stitch initially because it has connectors to our core tools (Harvest and Jira), but as I did more research I realized it was superior because of the Singer framework."

Singer is an open source standard that Stitch developed for writing scripts that move data. Singer integrations are free for anyone to use, regardless of whether they're a Stitch customer, and Singer’s extensibility allows Stitch to connect to any data source.

Bates says, "I spoke with our internal developers about building a new connector in Singer for Stitch. They loved the framework and were impressed. We work almost exclusively in various open source communities, so the community-contributed Harvest connector was natural for us to engage with. When there was an issue it was addressed by people in the Singer community quickly and effectively."

For the data sources Stitch supports natively, Stitch was simple to use. "Honestly, I just turned it on," Bates says. "We're working hard right now to switch over to using Stitch completely instead of our custom code. Once that's done we'll save five to 10 hours a month of developer time troubleshooting our data connectivity."