Obscurity is the Enemy
Joe's Nerdy Rants #56 - Stop hiding and build your network, plus weekend reads and other stuff
Pretty short on time for this newsletter, as I’m in the middle of researching and writing for my book, and packing for yet another trip.
When I’m asked for career advice, I always ask people about the health of their network. Often, people neglect building and maintaining their network until they need to call in some favors. By then it’s too late. Their network is stale and people can smell their transactional nature like roadkill.
For most people, their biggest enemy is obscurity. The simple and harsh fact is most people don’t know you and very few care. If you’re looking for work, especially in this job market, this is a terrible place to be. You need to escape the black hole of obscurity.
Always cultivate your network. Selflessly help others. Contribute to conversations. Write articles. Make videos. Give talks at meetups and online events. Mentor people. Become known in your community and field. All of these things add up over time and add to your visibility.
Obscurity is the enemy you must defeat at all costs.
Cool Weekend Reads
The advent of the Open Data Lake
What I Wish Someone Told Me About Postgres | ChallahScript
AWS Lambda turns 10: A rare look at the doc that started it
Inside the $20 million business of gutting failed Bay Area tech companies
Lessons from my First Exit · mtlynch.io
Not Satire: The Onion acquires Infowars
O2 unveils Daisy, the AI granny wasting scammers’ time - Virgin Media O2
OpenAI and others seek new path to smarter AI as current methods hit limitations | Reuters
Report: The Long Tail of AI | A Contrary Research Deep Dive
The End Of ARR - by Akash Bajwa - Software Synthesis
New Show & Upcoming Events
The Joe Reis Show
Freestyle Fridays - Obscurity is Your Enemy (Spotify)
Chris Riccomini - Building (and Writing About) Data Intensive Applications (Spotify)
Beers and Data with Friends in Helsinki, Finland (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - The Quality Paradox (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - Asking Good Questions at Conferences (Spotify)
Wes McKinney (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - Is AI a Hail Mary for Tech Debt? (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - Speaking at Conferences (Spotify)
Vijay Yadav - GenAI-Ready Data (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - Playing Not to Lose (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 - The Monday Morning Data Chat’ is over. But you can still find the back catalog on your podcast platform of choice, or on YouTube.
The Finale! - YouTube
Paco Nathan - (Spotify, YouTube)
Weimo Liu - (Spotify, YouTube)
Matthew Mullins - (Spotify, YouTube)
Ricky Thomas and Paul Dudley - (Spotify, YouTube)
Andrew Ng - Why Data Engineering is Critical to Data-Centric AI (Spotify, YouTube)
Tevje Olin - What Should Data Engineers Focus On? (Spotify, YouTube)
Rob Harmon - Small Data, Efficiency, and Data Modeling (Spotify, YouTube)
Joe Reis & Matt Housley - The Return of the Show! (Spotify, YouTube)
Nick Schrock & Wes McKinney - Composable Data Stacks and more (Spotify, YouTube)
Zhamak Dehghani + Summer Break Special (Spotify, YouTube)
Chris Tabb - Platform Gravity (YouTube)
Ghalib Suleiman - The Zero-Interest Hangover in Data and AI (Spotify, YouTube)
Events I’m At
Forward Data Conference - Paris, France. November 25. Register here
Data Day Texas - Austin, TX. January 25, 2025. Register here
Data Modeling Zone - Arizona. March 4, 2025. Register here
Winter Data Conference - Austria. March 7, 2025. Register here
Netherlands - TBA. April 2025
Much more to be announced soon…
Would you like me to speak or give a workshop at your event? Submit a speaking request here.
Thanks! If you want to help out…
The Data Engineering Professional Certificate is one of the most popular courses on Coursera! Learn practical data engineering with lots of challenging hands-on examples. Shoutout to the fantastic people at Deeplearning.ai and AWS, who helped make this a reality over the last year. Enroll here.
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.
The Data Therapy Session calendar is posted here. It’s an incredible group where you can share your experiences with data - good and bad - in a judgment-free place with other data professionals. If you’re interested in regularly attending, add it to your calendar.
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.
Be sure to leave a lovely review if you like the content.
Thanks!
Joe Reis
Commenting on this post to develop a genuine friendship 😁
Walking away from the guy like they were going to catch a cold. Brilliant and funny.