Boring is Back!
Joe's Nerdy Rants #16 - Weekend reads and other stuff
Boring is Back!
I’m pretty brain-dead from travel over the last week, so I’ll just leave this blurb here. I’ll be expanding on these ideas in future posts, as there’s a ton to unpack.
Boring is Back! Solving the classical data problems is getting simpler, and this allows us to move up the value chain to solve "boring" problems. This also gives us an opportunity to work on the next generation of data challenges, namely integrating ML and AI into every business workflow.
Listen to the audio clip above on this topic, which is also my 5-Minute Friday on Spotify.
Cool Weekend Reads
I hope you all had a great week. I’ve been touring Australia all week and enjoying it!
Here are some cool things I read this week…
Tech, AI & Data
ChatGPT Killed the Old AI. Now Everyone Is Rushing to Build a New One (The Algorithmic Bridge)
I sometimes joke we’re in a “classical ML/deep learning winter.” Time will tell what the next evolution of ML will be, but the author is right that we’re squeezing out whatever’s left with Transformers.
The Worst Programmer I Know (Dan North & Associates)
“Tim wasn’t delivering software; Tim was delivering a team that was delivering software. The entire team became more effective, more productive, more aligned, more idiomatic, more fun, because Tim was in the team.”
Screw Tim. Jk. Tim is awesome. Sometimes the wrong measurement highlights the wrong behavior…
ChatGPT traffic slips again for third month in a row (Reuters)
I’m very curious about what back-to-school means for ChatGPT and similar services. ChatGPT might be the equivalent of the hand calculator when I was growing up in the 1980’s. Kids need them and there’s an associated seasonality with purchases and usage. Time will tell.
Exclusive: How Apple got creators to take a risk on Vision Pro (Digital
Trends)
For as long as I can remember, VR has been almost there. Will the Vision Pro nudge the field forward? Who knows. I’m actually stoked about the Vision Pro and plan to write some apps for the platform this Fall, more just to explore the potential of this medium.
Business & Startups
My Experience with Joe Reis is that he's only in it for book sales or conference seats (Reddit)
The cat’s out of the bag. It’s been a rouse all along. I’m only in this for the money I get from conferences and books! And Zach Wilson and I are in cahoots to get more followers. Data world - you’ve been played.
In all seriousness, this is a good example of what happens when you make a post acting like an entitled child, and end up getting eviscerated by dozens of people for acting like one. I could rant about my feelings on this post, but I’ll refrain from punching down. Thanks to everyone who stepped up for me. 🙏
Domo: Cautionary Tale of Hype & Inefficiency (Only CFO)
My opinions of Domo aside, this is a good article that explains a lot about the excess valuations of many companies in the data space. Lots of dog shit companies out there about to face a day of reckoning.
New Content, Events, and Upcoming Stuff
Monday Morning Data Chat
Coming up…
The Future of Generative AI in Data Analytics w/ Amit Prakash - (LinkedIn, YouTube)
In case you missed it…
Incentivizing Devs to Pursue Open-Source Projects w/ Max Howell (Spotify, YouTube)
Data Grifters w/ Aaron Hunsaker (Spotify, YouTube)
The Power of 3 (Math Nerds, Professors, and O'Reilly Authors) w/ Hala Nelson (Spotify, YouTube)
Streaming Data Processing Deep Dive w/ David Yaffe and Johnny Graettinger (co-founders of Estuary) (Spotify, YouTube)
The Joe Reis Show
5 Minute Friday - Boring is Back! (Spotify)
Aaron Neiderhiser & Coco Zuloaga - Fixing Medical Data from First Principles (Spotify)
In case you missed it…
5 Minute Friday - Start Playing Offense (Spotify)
David Foster - Generative Deep Learning, Writing a Best-Selling Book, and More (Spotify)
Kevin Hu - How the Data Landscape Evolves Alongside LLM’s (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - If Not Now, When? (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - Data NIMBYism and Gatekeeping w/ Matt Housley (Spotify)
Events
September
Big Data London- 9/20 - register here
October
Bangalore, India - 10/12. DEWcon - register here
Dubai - 10/16-10/19. GITEX - register here
Chicago - 10/26 - GOTO Conference Data Engineering Masterclass. This is a VERY rare opportunity to learn data engineering from Matt Housley and me, in person - register here
November
Canada - DAMA Toronto. Details TBA
Finland - TBA
Las Vegas - ReInvent - got a massive special announcement in store :)
2024 - lots of stuff. Stay tuned :)
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.
The Joe Reis Show (Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts). My other show. I interview guests, and it’s totally unscripted with no shilling.
Fundamentals of Data Engineering (Amazon, O’Reilly, and wherever you get your books)
Be sure to leave a nice review if you like the content.
Thanks! - Joe Reis
"Sometimes the wrong measurement highlights the wrong behavior…" this one isn't a sometimes, it's always. I've realized that the common incentives in software all encourage team destruction - everything is incentivized to recognize individual contributions and achievements. Companies typically interview seniors by asking them to design the Instagram news feed (as if that hadn't itself gone through multiple architectural iterations - funny enough I once interviewed a guy who worked on the Facebook news feed and gave me some fascinating details on how it's actually done), or design Redis (because you can't just install the actual Redis that took years to build and optimize) and ignore the hard truth that you're rarely going to get an opportunity like that. You're rarely going to be called on to build a depth first search or write a dynamic programming solution. What you are going to need to do is manage and monitor systems, debug complex issues, coordinate development efforts, communicate to co-workers and supervisors, understand the business, and hopefully stick with the company long enough to be forced to live with the consequences of your decisions. Companies recognize people for building a new system but typically give no recognition to engineers who do the hard debugging, or institute cost-saving changes in a system that's too expensive to operate, or build out a CI/CD system that speeds up deployments, because none of that is "creating new business" or whatever the CEO had in mind for their own career-building move. It keeps the business running, but it's not stuff a business wants to measure and a lot of it highlights the ugly truth that there was a lot of work that was done previously that was sloppy or poorly engineered. So we're in a situation where people stay 1-3 years at a job, pick up some resume points, and leave for a promotion and/or more pay.
But hey "nobody wants to work anymore!" and "it's impossible to hire software engineers!"
There I contributed my five minute rant :)