Joe's Nerdy Rants #7
We Get the Community We Deserve, plus weekend reads and other stuff
We Get the Community We Deserve
I just returned home from a whirlwind week of traveling to Vancouver, Las Vegas, and San Francisco for conferences, meetups, low-key happy hours, lower-key and lower-brow after-hours parties, and other data community-related shenanigans. People ask how I keep up with my travels and antics. The short answer is that I like the data community, and it’s exciting to meet people in the field, hear their stories, and understand what they’re about. All in all, I’m very excited about the people in the data community. Everyone seems genuinely motivated and stoked to contribute to the improvement of the community.
That said, I felt weird that the two big data platforms - Snowflake and Databricks1 - had their conferences in the same week in different cities. It felt like somebody forced a wedge in the middle of the data community, and it made for awkward and expensive decisions for sponsors and attendees. Do you attend one or both? If so, how? I didn’t meet many who appreciated this forced duality.
The major data platforms are in an arms race, which is expected behavior. Kill or be killed. Kill ‘em all (great album, by the way!). Both companies want to drive attention to their platforms at each other’s expense. It’s a zero-sum game, and it’s getting very sharp-elbowed. Especially in a sluggish economic environment, I don’t expect this situation to change. In June 2024, these companies are having their conferences on the exact dates, this time in San Francisco. I’ve got mixed feelings about this, but it is what it is. Except that San Francisco is a total shitshow on a good day, logistics for both conferences will be theoretically simpler.
UPDATE - IT APPEARS THESE EVENTS ARE NOW A WEEK APART, BOTH IN SAN FRANCISCO.
While I don’t have a problem attending Big-Vendor conferences, I don’t feel they truly capture the essence of what we’re trying to do as a data community. The bottom line is they’re trying to sell stuff (duh). Let me give you my perspective as a speaker. The intense push on selling affects how speakers are treated and the topics they can present. One of these conferences asked me to give a talk about products they want to push. On top of that, timelines were super aggressive for slides to be submitted “because legal review,” AND they weren’t comping my speaking fee and travel. Since I’m not a charity, don’t enter into lopsided relationships, and I’m in the middle of many paid projects, I decided this wasn’t a good fit for me. No hard feelings, but business is business.
What would I change? Since I’m mainly in the data engineering community, I’m looking forward to a standalone data engineering conference2. The community deserves more data engineering conferences free of vendor-pissing contests/agenda and focusing on practitioners. We get the community we deserve. We deserve better3.
As a side note, I’m also excited to see more outside-of-conference and low-key events. This is really why I show up because it’s mostly free of scripted BS. Just a lot of people having drinks and great conversations. I’m bummed I missed several parties in Vegas and San Francisco, but it is what it is.
BTW - shoutout to everyone I met in Vancouver, Las Vegas, and San Francisco! You know who you are.
Listen to the audio clip above on this topic, which is also my 5 Minute Friday on Spotify.
Cool Weekend Reads
This week was quite light for me, reading-wise. Cuz nonstop travel and conferences.
Here are some cool things I read this week…
Tech, AI & Data
An Interview with Marc Andreessen about AI and How You Change the World (Stratechery)
A world-class interview about AI and beyond with Marc Andreessen and Ben Thompson.
The Rise of the AI Engineer (Latent Space)
Is AI Engineer the new data scientist, which is, therefore, the sexiest job of the 21st century?
RoboCat: A self-improving robotic agent (Deepmind)
Cool and creepy. A robot that learns and self-generates its own new training data. Link to paper in the article here. Worth a read.
Interesting and possibly useful/useless prognostications. I think it’s impossible to truly understand where things are going, especially since barely anyone predicted how ChatGPT would capture the public imagination in late 2022. Still, I like reading this stuff, like I enjoy reading horoscopes (I’m a Pisces).
BTW, why do articles like this always use the same cliched white robot hand used in “I Robot”?
Business & Startups
👩🎨 Being "rockstars": when software was a talents/creatives industry 🎭 (More Pablo)
Has the software industry transitioned from a creative and talents-driven industry to a “commodified sludge” industry?
Consultants Emerge as Early Winners in Generative AI Boom (WSJ)
No shit…
Magic Mushrooms. LSD. Ketamine. The Drugs That Power Silicon Valley (WSJ)
Growing up as a degenerate in the 1990s, psychedelics were something we’d do in a Grateful Dead parking lot. Now they’re mainstream, even in business settings. Times have definitely changed…
New Content, Events, and Upcoming Stuff
This week
Monday Morning Data Chat - #132 - Data Collaboration From the Outside-In w/ Andrew Padilla (Spotify, YouTube)
The Joe Reis Show
Colleen Fotsch - From Athlete to Analyst (Spotify)
Kris Jenkins - Programming as Art, Finding Your Niche, and MANY Wonderful Tangents (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - We Get the Community We Deserve (Spotify)
Upcoming
Monday Morning Data Chat - Andrew Jones
The Joe Reis Show - Tristan Handy, Ravit Jain, and many more!
Here are some cool upcoming in-person events I’ll be at in June and beyond for 2023
Taking July off…🏔️, except for the virtual Portable Conference and a few other things. My calendar is otherwise completely blocked off from July to early August, so let’s chat over email or similar.
Portable Low Key Conference - July 12
Joe Reis + dbt roadshow - Seattle, Atlanta, Chicago, and more. Details are coming soon.
DataEngByes. I’ll be on the continental tour in Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney for a couple of weeks. August 2023 (more info and registration)
Big Data London - I’m keynoting. Big up the London Massive. September 2023.
Europe - September 2023 TBA
Dubai - October 2023
Vegas - ReInvent 2023
More to come…
Thanks! If you mind helping 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
Full disclosure - Ternary Data partners with Snowflake and Databricks, and we’re friendly with both. They also know we’re notoriously vendor-neutral, which actually brings them credibility in customer discussions. I’m just here to talk about the impacts on the data community at large, not my respective opinions of these companies.
This is by no means exclusive to data engineering. I feel like a lot of data sub-communities have a ton of potential for great community-led events.
I’d like to give shouts out to Ethan Aaron, DataEngBytes, and Data Day Texas, who are leading the way in community-driven, data engineering-specific conferences.
Can't put it myself any better. Vendor pissing contests!