Business intelligence development often moves at a slow pace. For any given project, a developer will spend weeks and sometimes months with stakeholders to determine requirements. That means a lot of meetings, emails, and slack conversations, all of which are meant to move stakeholders towards a consensus on what they want.

That seems to be the opposite of what a developer should be doing. But there’s one part of the process that makes it all worth it – the part where they actually get to build the dang thing.

For me, there’s usually a routine to that. I block four to five hours off on my calendar, sit down with a cup of coffee, and zone out to Final Fantasy music as I write SQL, program R, or build a Tableau dashboard to fulfill the requirements.

And I feel great while doing it. I become completely immersed in what I'm doing and thoughts about deadlines, relationships, or the future completely vanish for those four hours.

Psychologists call this state of mind flow.

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from Tableau announcing that Salesforce completed its purchase of the company. I went on Yahoo! Finance and, sure enough, Tableau’s stock was no more. This made me sad because I enjoyed watching Tableau's stock volatile swings in the market.

What would I look at now that it was gone?

So I researched a few other business intelligence stocks to find a good replacement. I looked at the big players, such as Oracle and SAP, and a handful of smaller companies, such as Alteryx, Cloudera, Domo, Splunk, Talend.

While looking, I noticed one stock dramatically outperformed the rest. That stock was Alteryx (Ticker: AYX).