What Do Data Analysts Really Love?

Reddit Reveals Data Analysts’ Top Vices, Values, and Vibes

Ever wonder what analysts jam out to while building complex workflows? Or what fuels their midnight dashboard sprints? Spoiler: it’s not just black coffee and SQL.

The Savant team went to an offsite in Mexico, where we all got to hang out, brainstorm, and, yes (hurray), not be on a Zoom or Teams call. Sure, we talked about tech, code, our customers, and the analytics market, but we also had fun talking about our hobbies, interests, favorite food, intriguing artists, sports, and just fun stuff. So we got to wondering, what do our fellow analysts like outside of solving big business challenges?

We took a scroll through the depths of Reddit (shoutout to r/dataisbeautiful, r/analytics, and r/consulting) and discovered that data people, despite their clean dashboards and crisp logic, have some wild and wonderful tastes. From sushi obsession to synthwave playlists, here’s a breakdown of what we’ll call the Top 5 Analyst Guilty Pleasures and Go-To’s.

And yes, the team at Savant is eating this up, because building for analysts means knowing what makes you tick. Spoiler alert: We agree with many of your choices!

Want to tap into Reddit’s rich stream of user-driven insights? With the Reddit API, you can quickly collect fresh content, user activity, and engagement data from any subreddit — like /r/music — with just a few requests, all within Savant! Harness the power of Savant’s API Tool to send requests to the Reddit API, then transform and analyze the data without writing complex scripts. Whether you’re tracking comment trends, user behavior, or viral content, Savant makes it easy to uncover insights from Reddit data at scale. It’s the perfect combo for turning community conversations into actionable intelligence. 

To get Reddit API credentials, log into your Reddit account and visit https://www.reddit.com/prefs/apps. Click “Create App,” choose the “script” app type, and provide a name, description, and redirect URI (you can use http://localhost). After creating the app, you’ll be given a client ID (the string under the app name) and a client secret. These credentials are used to authenticate API requests using OAuth2. Store the Client ID, Client Secret, and App Name in an Excel spreadsheet. These will be used as inputs in your Savant workflow to pull data from Reddit’s API. Finally, get a secret key from TheBase64. We will need this to base64 encode our Client ID and Client Secret as we pass data to Reddit. The Client ID:Client Secret will need to be encoded first to successfully make requests to Reddit’s API. Your input file for the Savant analysis should contain the following four columns:

• client_id (Reddit)
• client_secret (Reddit)
• app_name (Reddit)
• base64_secret (Base64) 

Once your spreadsheet is correctly formatted, simply open this Savant workflow, replace the placeholder ‘reddit-api-credentials.xlsx’ input file with your spreadsheet, and you’re ready to run the analysis yourself!

🎧 Top 5 Music Vibes Analysts Love

1. Lo-Fi Beats – Lofi Girl basically lives in every analyst’s browser tab.
2. Tycho & ODESZA – Synthwave is the soundtrack of analytical flow.
3. Philip Glass – Because minimalist piano + max data = pure bliss.
4. Radiohead – Moody, intelligent, and a little bit existential. Same.
5. 80s Throwbacks – Because nothing pairs with pivot tables like Hall & Oates.
   

Data prep is an art, and these beats are the soundtrack to masterpieces.

🍣 Top 5 Analyst Food Fixations

1. Sushi – Precision. Elegance. Raw. Just like a good data model.
2. Ramen – Comfort meets complexity in a bowl.
3. Cold Brew Coffee – More beloved than some BI tools.
4. Poke Bowls – Fast, fresh, and endlessly customizable — kind of like Savant workflows!
5. Dark Chocolate Almonds – The snack of champions.
   

They don’t just fuel insights — they snack with intent.

🎮 Top 5 Analyst-Favorite Games and Sports

1. Chess – Strategy, foresight, and the occasional checkmate Slack emoji.
2. NBA (esp. the Warriors) – High-performance stats culture = analyst catnip.
3. Formula 1 – Real-time telemetry. Split-second analytics.
4. Board Games (Catan, Terraforming Mars) – Data in cardboard form.
5. Starcraft and Factorio – For those who automate for fun and profit.
   

These aren’t just games. They’re training simulations for future Chief Analytics Officers!

🎨 Top 5 Analyst-Approved Artists and Creatives

1. M.C. Escher – When data gets paradoxical.
2. Giorgia Lupi – Turning data into poetic design.
3. Edward Tufte – The godfather of clean data viz.
4. James Turrell – Immersive, interactive, light-driven logic.
5. Jonathan Blow (The Witness) – Puzzle logic meets visual elegance.
   

Data people don’t just admire art — they reverse engineer it.

☁️ Top 5 Other Analyst Obsessions

1. Reading Behavioral Economics – Kahneman over Kindle.
2. Mindfulness Apps – Headspace before heatmaps.
3. Open-Source Side Projects – GitHub > Netflix.
4. Traveling to Japan or Amsterdam – Clean data meets cleaner design.
5. Tableau Public and Observable Notebooks – Yes, people journal with dashboards.
   

Even downtime looks suspiciously like work. But prettier.

🚀 So… Why Does This Matter to Savant?

Because we don’t just build tools for analysts. At Savant, we:

• Embrace clean design and modular logic like a sushi chef with an API.
• Serve up instant results with the speed of an F1 pit crew.
• Respect logic, but revere creative freedom.
• Bake governance, privacy, and performance into every layer, without ever slowing you down.

And most importantly, we see analysts not just as “users,” but as brilliant, eccentric, wildly creative humans who deserve better tools. So, a big thank you for all the contributions on the Reddit threads, the synthwave playlists, the chocolate almonds, and the people who turn data into clarity, one espresso-fueled insight at a time!