Wherever You Go, There You Are

Joe's Nerdy Rants #21 - Weekend reads and other stuff

I'm just getting ready to go on another mini-tour. I look forward to seeing you if you’re in Toronto, Helsinki, Silicon Valley, Vegas, Denver, or Texas.

Thanks,

Joe Reis

P.S. Want me to speak at your event in the first half of 2024? Please reach out to me by 11/6/2023. No matter who you are, I won’t accept talk or event inquiries after this date.

Wherever You Go, There You Are

This is a short and straightforward rant this week. In my travels, I talk to a lot of data teams. As the old saying goes, wherever you go, there you are. No matter where I go in the world, the question of “What tools should I use?” pops up repeatedly. I generally shy away from prescribing tools, as this highly depends on your use case and, more importantly, what the business needs. Plus, tooling discussions usually devolve into a pissing match of how much trivia everyone knows about particular tools. While those conversations are fun occasionally, they’re highly distracting and usually a waste of time. I’d rather talk about solving problems at a fundamental level, referring to tools as they assist in the solution.

Let me address two major buckets of questions I get.

1. How to work with “the business”?

2. What tools should I use?

There’s an order of operations that works and another that doesn’t. Data teams often choose the path that doesn’t work, jumping straight to #2. This is a massive mistake; inevitably, many things are built that nobody asked for and don’t add value. Always start with #1. Understand what the business stakeholders want. Then, translate this to #2. Business case, then tools. Never the reverse.

Listen to the audio clip above on this topic, which is also my 5-Minute Friday on Spotify.

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Cool Weekend Reads

Here are some cool things I read this week. Enjoy!

Tech, AI & Data

AI ‘breakthrough’: neural net has human-like ability to generalize language (Nature)

This is a massive step toward better AI. Definitely worth knowing about.

Up: Portable Microservices Ready for the Cloud

I’d heard that Uber’s original microservice architecture was insane, to put it politely. 4,500 microservices for 4,000 engineers is…it is what it is. This is a really good story of how they moved to multi-cloud.

AI risk must be treated as seriously as climate crisis, says Google DeepMind chief (The Guardian)

Given the weak global response to climate change, I’m not hopeful about AI being treated differently.

Business & Startups

Death from overfunding: An obituary for Convoy (FreightWaves)

Convoy received a ton of money and still managed to close down. This is a cautionary tale of when blitzscaling goes wrong (and it often does).

Positioning Yourself Near the Opportunity (Matt Rickard)

As Charlie Munger says, “fish where the fish are.” Most of getting an opportunity is just being around in the first place.

The poster’s guide to the internet of the future (The Verge)

Platforms come and go, and you often have no control over how the platform treats you. This week, even poor Bill Inmon had his LinkedIn account closed for no apparent reason (he later got it back - thanks to everyone who helped with this). POSSE seems like an excellent idea. Own your platform, then syndicate.

New Content, Events, and Upcoming Stuff

Monday Morning Data Chat

Coming up…

Why is Data Security So Hard? w/ Yoav Cohen (LinkedIn Live, YouTube)

In case you missed it…

Data Conference Recap (Coalesce, Gitex Dubai, DEWCon) w/ Kevin Hu (Spotify, YouTube)

Data Warehouses and Semantics Deep Dive, SDF, and more w/ Lukas Schulte - (Spotify, YouTube)

Improving Your Health and Wellness - Techie Edition w/ Colleen Fotsch (Spotify, YouTube)

Data Engineering AMA w/ Matt Housley & Joe Reis (Spotify, Youtube)

The Joe Reis Show

Coming up…

Bill Inmon - History Lessons of the Data Industry. This is a real treat and a very rare conversation with the godfather himself.

This week…

5 Minute Friday - Wherever You Go, There You Are (Spotify)

Matt Sharp & Chris Brousseau - Writing "LLMs in Production" (the midway edition) - (Spotify)

In case you missed it…

5 Minute Friday - AI Carnival Barkers (Spotify)

Johnny Graettinger - A Deep Dive on Streaming and Immutable Logs (Spotify)

5 Minute Friday - Building a Global Data Engineering Community (Spotify)

Bob Muglia - Moving Beyond SQL, Knowledge Graphs, and More (Spotify)

Events

November

Canada, 11/2-11/3 - DAMA Toronto - register here

Finland, 11/9 - Agile Data Engine Summit - register here

San Jose, CA, 11/16 - TBA

Las Vegas - Gable’s Party during ReInvent, 11/28

December

dbt + Joe Reis Roadshow - TBA

2024

Data Day Texas (Austin) - register here

Data Modeling Zone (Arizona) - register here

Skiers in Data (Switzerland) - TBA

Spain - TBA

South Africa - TBA

Dubai - TBA

Australia - TBA

Friendly reminder - Do you want me to speak at your event in the first half of 2024? Get your inquiries to me by 11/6/2023. I won’t be accepting talk or event inquiries after this date. Thanks.

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