👋 What’s happening y’all! August was a big month for The Data Stack Show. We had more listeners than ever, and we published Episode 100 🎉 . It’s hard to believe we’ve created so much content since Episode One aired in August of 2020. If you had told any of us back then that we’d hit 100 episodes and have a guest list that included folks from companies like Netflix and Uber, hot startups like Hex and Transform, and just people with incredible backgrounds (NASA, Obama Administration, etc.) we probably wouldn’t have believed you. Thanks for listening and making it all possible for us. We’re always experimenting with new things to keep it interesting for you, so stay tuned for the next 100 episodes and some other fun along the way.
🌯 The August Wrap
Here’s what you missed (if you missed it) on The Data Stack Show last month:
Category Theory and the Mathematical Foundation of the Technologies We Use with Eric Daimler (twitter) of Conexus
Why you should listen – Because Eric is the first (and hopefully not the last) former member of a presidential administration we’ve had on the show, and his simplified definition of Artificial Intelligence is tremendous. Also, if you just love math, don’t miss this one.
🎧 Listen / Tweet
State of the Data Lakehouse with Vinoth Chandar (twitter) of Apache Hudi and Onehouse
Why you should listen – To get the origin story of the Data Lakehouse from Vinoth, who created the first data lakehouse, which they called a transactional data lake, at Uber. Plus, you’ll get Vinoth’s take on where the Data Lakehouse is today and where it’s headed next.
Data Quality is Relative to Purpose with James Campbell of Superconductive
Why you should listen – To learn how Great Expectations is built to help you protect the inputs and outputs of the two distinct operations of a data system: data moving between systems and being enriched or augmented in this process, and data being synthesized.
The Future of Machine Learning with Willem Pienaar (twitter) of Tecton and Tristan Zajonc of Continual
Why you should listen – To hear from two experts building at the forefront of Machine Learning. Willem and Tristan talk about the convergence of the Analytics and ML Stacks, and they consider where this makes sense and where it doesn’t.
Building Pinot for Real-Time, Interactive User Analytics with Kishore Gopalakrishna (twitter) of StarTree
Why you should listen – For the story on how and why Apache Pinot came out of Linkedin. Kishore explains the differences between internal analytics and user analytics, and he details how they built Apache Pinot to solve some of the challenges unique to user-facing analytics.
🎥 The September Preview
Get ready to hear from these brilliant minds this month:
Benn Stancil – Chief Analytics Officer + Founder at Mode 👀 Out now!
Astasia Myers – Founding Partner at Quiet Capital
Lauren Balik / Ethan Aaron – Founder at Upright Analytics / CEO at Portable
🔗 Saved to Pocket
Further reading from last month’s shows plus curated links from Eric and Kostas
Dr. Eugenia Cheng on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert – Eric Daimler mentioned Eugenia more than once on the show and praised her ability to explain categorical algebra in a way even four year olds can understand – through baking! Watch this video to see what he means.
Cloud Infrastructure Part I: Data + Machine Learning – Vinoth retweeted this piece from Sai Senthilkumar recently noting Sai’s observation about the flip of spending from warehouses to data lakes.
You Are What You Eat: Why Data Quality Matters for Machine Learning – This piece from the team at Great Expectations is a perfect segue from the Data Quality topic of our show with James to the next week’s episode on The Future of Machine Learning.
Inside Meta's AI optimization platform for engineers across the company – Neither Willem nor Tristan could contain their excitement about Looper. Read this to get the lowdown on the project coming out of Meta.
The Golden Pinot – The Startree team really outdid themselves (and Steven Spielberg) with this clever ad for the upcoming Real-Time Analytics Summit. Seriously. It’s amazing and well worth 1:30 of your time.
🗓 Upcoming Events
Join once and future guests of The Data Stack Show at these upcoming events:
9/28 | Startree Data | Real-Time Analytics Summit
9/28 | Locally Optimistic | Moving from Analytics to ML
10/17-21 | dbt | Coalesce
🙏 Gratitude
“As I reflect on the 100th Episode of The Data Stack Show, I want to thank Eric and Kostas for bringing me along on this journey. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about the data space in a relatively short time thanks to all of our incredible guests and Eric and Kostas’ ability to ask great questions. We’ve come a long way and had a lot of fun since I jumped in and started producing the show. I’m grateful to work with such amazing hosts to bring the show to you every week and continue experimenting and growing. Here’s to another 100 episodes 🥂 ”
– Brooks
Thanks for reading! If it was worth your time, please share the newsletter with your friends, and subscribe if you haven’t yet. Oh, and we’d love to hear from you, reply to this email if you have any feedback for us or just want to connect. ✌ See ya next month.
P.S. We love talking to founders, but we realize some of our best (and most helpful) shows are the ones with people like Paige and Sean who work with data every day. To that end, if you work in data and are interested in coming on the show (or would like to nominate a friend), please respond to this email and let us know. It would be great to connect, and if it’s a good fit, we’ll get a recording lined up.
- Brooks & The Data Stack Show Team