I just wrapped up a great Maven course, Transition from Data Practitioner to Effective Leader, which I taught alongside award-winning data executive Sol Rashidi. We taught a cohort of people motivated to level up their careers, and we learned just as much from them as they learned from us. These are my favorite forms of value exchange.
One thing that stood out is how people view “success.” Very often, career success is about moving up in title and rank. Based on the conversations (some might say therapy sessions) I have with many people in high-title/rank positions, the lamentation I hear is, “Is this it? Is this what I worked hard to achieve?” If this is the only path to success, we might need to rethink what success means.
I’ve seen “successful” people take a number of paths, including the following.
Title
Prestige
Influence
Money
Helping others
There are infinitely more versions of success than these. My big point to the class was to find the path to success that works for you. There’s no “right” path you can take. The corporate executive route was never for me. Yet I’m having a lot of fun and consider myself “successful.” Success, to me, means impacting a lot of people with education and thought leadership.
You have your path and definition of success. Go that way.
Also, I’m back to the prior format for the newsletter - title in the subject line and other best practices ;) It's a small change, and I’ve had fun experimenting with switching things up. People asked for the ability to search by title, so here you go.
This is a pretty short newsletter. I’m filming my upcoming Coursera course all weekend, so gotta get back to that. More details on that course are coming this Summer.
Hope you have a fun weekend!
Thanks,
Joe
P.S. 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
OpenAI Buys Enterprise Startup to Help Customers Sift Through Data (Bloomberg) - Shoutout to my friends at Rockset! Congrats!
I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again (Ludicity)
Nvidia’s Ascent to Most Valuable Company Has Echoes of Dot-Com Boom (WSJ)
AI took their jobs. Now they get paid to make it sound human (BBC)
Social-Media Influencers Aren’t Getting Rich—They’re Barely Getting By (WSJ)
Skills and jobs (Katie Bauer - Wrong But Useful)
Architectures for Central Server Collaboration (Matthew Weidner)
My thoughts on Python in Excel (XLWings)
The Documentation Tradeoff (Kent Beck)
Senior Engineer Fatigue - (luminousmen)
New Content, Events, and Upcoming Stuff
The Joe Reis Show
This week…
Nick Freund - Closing a Startup (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - “Success” (Spotify)
In case you missed it…
Doug Needham - Architecture Deep Dive, The Hard Work of Generative AI in the Enterprise, and more (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - WTF is a “Data Team”? (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - Don’t Be A D*ck (Spotify)
Juha Korpela - Conceptual Data Modeling Deep Dive (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - History Matters (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.
Monday Morning Data Chat
Note: Matt Housley and I are taking the Summer off from the Monday Morning Data Chat. We will be back in the Fall with an incredible new lineup.
In case you missed it…
Zhamak Dehghani + Summer Break Special (Spotify, YouTube)
Chris Tabb - Platform Gravity (YouTube)
Ghalib Suleiman - The Zero-Interest Hangover in Data and AI (Spotify, YouTube)
Bart Vandekerckhove - Data Security Deep Dive (Spotify, YouTube)
Yali Sassoon - Using LLMs to Support the Analytics Workflow (Spotify, YouTube)
David Yaffe & John Kutay - The State of Streaming and Change Data Capture (Spotify, YouTube)
Events I’m At
AI Quality Conference (San Francisco) - June 25th Register here. I’ll also be DJing there…
(Taking the Summer off, sort of…)
Big Data London - September 18-19. Register here
DataEngBytes (Australia) - Late September/Early October, TBA
Helsinki Data Week - Fall TBA
Lots of other stuff in Europe - Fall, TBA
Asia - Fall, TBA
Thanks! If you want to help out…
Thanks for supporting my content. If you aren’t a subscriber, please consider subscribing to this Substack.
Would you like me to speak at your event? Submit a speaking request here.
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.
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