Joe's Nerdy Weekend Reads #5
It's the weekend, so time to unwind. Pour a cup of coffee (or many) and enjoy some interesting reading.
Happy Saturday!
Last night I returned from Palo Alto, where I spent the week at the deeplearning.ai office. We recorded two courses for our upcoming Coursera Data Engineering Specialization. I stood in the same place (see pic below) for 8+ hours a day, excitedly reading from a teleprompter (I think reading 20k words a day). It’s way harder than it looks! I finished each day with my brain feeling like jello.
The fact that Andrew Ng and the deeplearning.ai crew are investing a lot of resources into this course should tell you all you need to know. They’re known for world-class courses, and the bar for quality is extremely high. The caliber of their team is easily the best I’ve ever seen. To be chosen as the instructor for this course is a huge honor!
Needless to say, this course is taking a lot of my attention and will result in a slight delay in my upcoming data modeling book. Given the magnitude of this course, the time commitment is massive. I think it will positively impact hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions, of people around the world. This makes it worth it to me.
I’m super excited for this course! It’s the perfect complement to Fundamentals of Data Engineering, which intentionally didn’t have code examples or labs. Students will get the chance to learn data engineering from both a theoretical and practical framework, which I think is ideal. Too much theory, and you lose hands-on capabilities. Too much hands-on, and you lose sight of the big picture. This course is the perfect blend of the two.
You’ll learn more about this course as it develops, and I’ll keep trickling hints and clues as we approach its launch.
In other news, I’m doing a live show in Chicago next Tuesday (4/23) with Matillion for their Deep Dish Data Virtual Series, alongside my occasional co-host Mark Balkenende. We’ll be chatting about Getting your Data Ready for AI, a topic near and dear to me. Check out the event here.
Don’t be jealous, but I’m off to lovely Malaga, Spain in early May for J on the Beach. Matt Housely and I are doing a workshop on the Fundamentals of Data Engineering. I suppose we’ll also be working on our tans during our downtime. The conference goes from May 8 to May 10. If you’re in the area, say hola!
After that, I’ll be back in London, UK, for the GenerativeAI Summit from May 21 to May 23. If you want to grab some pints, contact me. Register for the event here.
I have lots of other events coming up. Check them out at the end of this newsletter.
New articles and early drafts of my book are coming soon. I just need to dig out of my backlog of to-dos. Stay tuned.
Hope you have a fun weekend!
Thanks,
Joe
P.S. If you want to take your data career to the next level, check out my upcoming course with
. Get a 25% discount here.If you haven’t done so, please sign up for Practical Data Modeling. There are lots of great discussions on data modeling, and I’ll also be releasing early drafts of chapters for my new data modeling book here. Thanks!
Cool Weekend Reads
The End of Agile – Part 2 (Critiques of Agile) (TDAN.com)
Larry Burns is writing an excellent series of articles for TDAN about the rise and fall of Agile. In this second article in the series, he breaks down the criticisms of Agile in a very thoughtful and articulate way. Has Agile become a meaningless cult? Probably.
Larry is one of the people I most respect in the data field, so definitely check out his articles and books.
AI isn't useless. But is it worth it? (Molly White)
Molly captures a lot of what I’ve also been saying and writing about LLMs. They’re not exactly useless, but they aren’t universally useful. I use LLMs mostly for “conversations”, and I think ChatGPT Turbo and Gemini Advanced (I subscribe to both) are pretty decent at poking holes in my reasoning during our conversations. But as Molly says, these things aren’t great for writing text or code and often create much more work than if you just used existing non-AI tools.
Biometrics sketch me out. I’m very suspicious of most companies’ ability to secure my data, so I opt out of them. That said, given how much I travel, I juggle between Clear and TSA Precheck (sometimes TSA Precheck is faster, depending on the airport). I also have Global Entry, due to the amount of times I travel internationally (if you can get it, it’s worth it!). But with air travel, your biometric data is already stored in various databases, so it’s a moot point. But to order a burger? I’d rather pay cash…
The rise of the chief AI officer (FT)
This winter, I attended a forum of Chief Data Officers from some very big organizations, and it felt like the mood in the business landscape was shifting from a focus on data to AI (with the understanding that data empowers AI). So, the Chief Data Officer (CDO) title is morphing into the CAIO (Chief AI Officer). These titles tend to morph a lot, so what happens next? Who knows…
First Cut - State of Private Markets: Q1 2024 (Carta)
tl;dr - If you’re earlier stage, funding is looking better. For later-stage companies, things aren’t great. This graph of later-stage rounds (series D and E) is especially interesting. Compared with the top of the ZIRP days, rounds are far lower nowadays. Makes you wonder how far the runway will extend for these companies, even with these additional funding rounds. I imagine lots of tough decisions for costs, i.e. headcount…
Other cool reads…
Megalodon: Efficient LLM Pretraining and Inference with Unlimited Context Length (Arxiv) - this is a cool alternative to transformers
PostgreSQL 17 features I am most waiting for (The World of Data)
The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL (Infisical)
Tech Crunch Sees Creditors Turn ‘Violent’ to Get Repaid: Credit Weekly (Bloomberg)
Why Many AI Startups Are Consultancies Posing as Software Businesses (The Information) - might be paywalled
Developing Rapidly with Generative AI (Discord)
How Meta is paving the way for synthetic social networks (Platformer)
New Content, Events, and Upcoming Stuff
Monday Morning Data Chat
Coming up…
David Yaffe & John Kutay, Yali Sassoon, and more…
In case you missed it…
Solomon Kahn - Customer-Facing Data Products, Why A/B Testing is a Waste of Time, and More (Spotify, YouTube)
Katharine Jarmul - Are We Solving the “Right” Problems with AI? (Spotify, YouTube)
Matt Turck - The 2024 MAD Landscape (Special Show) (YouTube)
Cedric Chin & Sam Taylor - Communicating Sophisticated Stuff to Stakeholders (Spotify, YouTube)
Martin Musiol - Martin Musiol - Generative AI: Navigating the Course to the AGI Future (Spotify, YouTube)
The Joe Reis Show
This week…
Kent Graziano - The Data(Ops) Warrior (Spotify)
In case you missed it…
5 Minute Friday - Data Oceans (Spotify)
Keith Belanger - The Art of Data Modeling (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - Your Mileage WILL Vary With Analytical Data Modeling (Spotify)
Kishore Aradhya - Kishore Aradhya - Teaching Tech and Data in a FAST Moving World (Spotify)
Toby Mao - SQL Mesh, Simplifying Data Transformations, and more (Spotify)
Bill Inmon - History Lessons of the Data Industry. This is a real treat and a very rare conversation with the godfather himself (Spotify) - PINNED HERE.
Events I’m Speaking At
Matillion - Deep Dish (Virtual) - April 23. Register here
J On the Beach (Malaga, Spain) - May 6-10. Register here
GenAI Conference (London) - May 20-22 Register here
AI Quality Conference (San Francisco) - June 25th Register here. Rumor has it I’ll also be DJing there…
(Taking the Summer off, sort of…)
Big Data London - September, TBA
DataEngBytes (Australia) - Late September/Early October, TBA
Gitex (Dubai) - Fall, TBA
Helsinki Data Week - Fall TBA
Lots of other stuff in Europe - Fall, TBA
Asia - Fall, TBA
Thanks! If you want to help out…
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You can also find me here:
Monday Morning Data Chat (YouTube / Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts). Matt Housely and I interview the top people in the field. Live and unscripted. Zero shilling tolerated.
My other show is The Joe Reis Show (Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts). I interview guests on it, and it’s unscripted and free of shilling.
Practical Data Modeling. Great discussions about data modeling with data practitioners. This is also where early drafts of my new data modeling book will be published.
Fundamentals of Data Engineering by Matt Housley and I, available at Amazon, O’Reilly, and wherever you get your books.
Be sure to leave a lovely review if you like the content.
Thanks!
Joe Reis