The Data Stack Show

Latest Episodes:

37: The Components of Data Governance with Dave Melillo of FanDuel May 26, 2021

Show notes

Highlights from this week's episode include:

Dave's "nerdy" interests in sports statistics and data (2:12)
Trends in collecting, processing, and using data (4:45)
Finding a better term for "reverse ETL" (5:48)
The blurring of the distinction between sources and destinations (7:41)
The role of BI is changing (13:24)
Data governance and the physical execution behind it (19:00)
Data governance is defining and managing data in a logical way that is actionable by the business (23:43)
Consolidation of tools and services (28:49)
Databricks vs. Snowflake (33:49)
Dave's focus on regulatory data at FanDuel (45:47)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

36: Crypto and Compliance with Nick Fogle, Co-Founder of Churnkey and Wavve May 19, 2021

Show notes

On this week's episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas talk with Nick Fogle, co-founder of Churnkey and Wavve. Together they discuss how having a legal background can impact engineering decisions, dealing with privacy and compliance concerns, and selling Wavve and starting Churnkey as a result.

Highlights from this week's episode include:

Nick's background in economics and law and teaching himself to code (2:01)
Thinking like a lawyer and trying to minimize risk to the greatest extent possible (4:23)
GDPR and compliance (8:23)
Blockchain contracts (18:26)
Unique challenges surrounding compliance with a cryptocurrency startup (21:41)
Reconciling the right to be forgotten, GDPR, and blockchain permanence (27:16)
Building Churnkey after developing it as a way to lower churn among Wavve users (31:31)
How Churnkey's stack works (37:16)
Crypto predictions (39:02)

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

35: The Future of Development is Distributed with Jim Walker of Cockroach Labs May 12, 2021

Show notes

This week on The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas talk with Jim Walker, the VP of product marketing at Cockroach Labs, about distributed systems, competing against the speed of light, and making data easy.

Highlights from this week's episode include:

Jim background of translating deep technical concepts into understandable English and his work at Cockroach Labs (2:23)
The origin of Cockroach Labs and distributed SQL (6:10)
Living without Atomic Clocks (10:10)
Having the speed of light as the ultimate competitor (13:49)
CockroachDB’s users (19:35)
Figuring out big data for transactions (25:14)
Dealing with failure (35:04)
Open source code, community, and consumption (39:26)
Making data easy, and what's next for Cockroach (43:12)
Bringing programming into marketing (46:18)

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34: The Intersection of Data Engineering and Marketing with John Marbachm of Grafana Labs Apr 28, 2021

Show notes

On this week's episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas talk with John Marbach, senior growth manager at Grafana Labs. In this conversation, John discusses marketing ops and the blending of roles of data engineering and marketing.

Highlights from this week's episode include:

Grafana Labs John Marbach Senior Growth Manager
Introduction to John Marbach and working in the blurred lines between marketing and data engineering (2:14)
How managing pipeline building and consuming data influences the use of downstream tools (6:28)
Experiments in marketing (11:28)
Exploring the role of marketing ops (15:35)
How accruing technical debt can grind things to a halt (20:35)
Matching the stack with the company's scale (24:48)
CDPs and marketing to developers (28:40)
Biggest challenges and barriers between data engineering and marketing (35:19)
Takes on reverse ETL (39:07)
Thoughts on cryptocurrency and the blockchain (44:08)

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

33: ML is a Data Quality Problem with Peter Gao from Aquarium Learning Apr 14, 2021

Show notes

On this week's episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas talk with Peter Gao, co-founder, and CEO at Aquarium Learning. A former engineer at Cruise Automation, Peter and Aquarium Learning help ML teams improve their model performances by improving their data.

Highlights from this week's episode include:

How getting hit by a drunk driver made researching self-driving cars personal for Peter (2:12)
Filtering out the hype in self-driving car news to get a clear picture of its state today (6:52)
The data required for a self-driving vehicle (13:56)
Operation Vacation and how Aquarium can help provide the tools to make models better (16:53)
Utilizing neural networks to index data (20:41)
How Aquarium fits in the ML stack (30:25)
Interesting use cases of Aquarium (33:59)
Distinguishing subclasses of machine learning (40:05)
Human involvement in machine learning (46:13)

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

32: Cooking with Data Ops with Chris Bergh from DataKitchen Apr 07, 2021

Show notes

On this week's episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas talk with Chris Bergh, the CEO and head chef at Data Kitchen. DataKitchen’s mission is to provide the software, service, and knowledge that makes it possible for every data and analytics team to realize their full potential with DataOps.

Highlights from this week's episode include:

Chris' background and how the lessons learned in the Peace Corps and at NASA apply to him today (2:03)
Why AI left Chris feeling like a jilted lover (7:49)
Most projects that people do in data analytics fail (10:12)
Three things that DataOps focuses on (16:37)
Comparing and contrasting DevOps and DataOps (22:30)
The types of data that DataKitchen handles and building a product or a service around DataOps (29:29)
Fixing problems at the source instead of just offering a tool to slightly improve things downstream (37:17)
Where we are at in the process of how companies are going to run on data (41:43)

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

31: How a 160 Year-Old Publisher is Using Data with Jenna Lemonias From the Atlantic Mar 31, 2021

Show notes

On this week's episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas chat with Jenna Lemonias, director of data science at The Atlantic. The Atlantic, a publication that's been around since 1857, is adapting with the times and is implementing and emulating some of the data science practices seen at big tech companies.

Highlights from this week's episode include:

Jenna's background in astrophysics and how she pivoted to data science (2:14)
Differences in dealing with data at a FinTech company and then at a publication (4:40)
The relationship between analog and digital data at The Atlantic (9:22)
How The Atlantic structures its data science team (11:44)
The role data engineering plays (14:42)
Using natural language processing and machine-generated metadata (17:37)
The Atlantic's data stack (28:22)
The kind of data that's important to The Atlantic (29:44)
Big projects forthcoming for the data science team (37:13)

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

30: The DataStack Journey with Rachel Bradley-Haas and Alex Dovenmuehle of Big Time Data Mar 24, 2021

Show notes

On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas are joined by the co-founders of Big Time Data, Rachel Bradley-Haas, and Alex Dovenmuehle, formerly of Mattermost and prior to that, Heroku. At Big Time Data, they work together to provide companies with the ability to derive value and insights from decentralized datasets, improve business processes through data enrichment and automation, and build a scalable foundation to enable a data-driven culture.

Highlights from this week’s episode include:

Rachel and Alex's background and their goal to make data approachable for companies everywhere (3:09)
The data stack journey: making decisions when you're small that allow you to grow with your data and your organization (12:28)
The problems faced when a data stack isn't nurtured early on (15:59)
Changes in data stack technology (21:32)
How Alex and Rachel's roles at Big Time Data differ and interact with each other (39:00)
Client use cases (43:34)
Comparing the stacks of seed-stage startups, mid-sized companies, and giant enterprises (48:54)

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

29: The Present and Future of Data Engineering with Joe Reis and Matthew Housley from Ternary Data Mar 17, 2021

Show notes

On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas are joined by Matthew Housley, CTO, and Joe Reis, CEO and co-founder of Ternary Data. These self-described “recovering data scientists” focus on teaching skills to build a solid foundation for organizations to work with their data.

Highlights from this week’s episode include:

Joe and Matt’s background and expertise (2:44)
Common threads and trends in the data sphere (9:39)
Differences and commonalities between startups and enterprises and the way they deal with data (18:28)
Discussing how the role of data engineering has evolved over the years and what it might morph into in the near future (27:52)
The ideal data infrastructure and what future shifts excite them (39:52)
How ML is shaping the data space (44:30)
The state of real time (49:56)

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

28: Next Gen Data Governance with Stefania from Avo Mar 10, 2021

Show notes

On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas are joined by Stefanía Bjarney Ólafsdóttir, the CEO and co-founder of Avo. Avo, which started in 2018, provides data analytics governance as a service, helping organizations make data-driven decisions to improve their customer experience.

Highlights from this week’s episode include:

Stefania's background with mathematics, philosophy, bioinformatics and consumer mobile (2:39)
Making pioneering decisions as head of data science at QuizUp (8:34)
Is less more? Choosing fundamental parts of the customer experience and understanding them very well (16:56)
Bringing data consumers closer to data producers (18:34)
Avo mission to provide analytics governance as a service (25:09)
Avo use cases (36:37)
Focusing on event-based data (44:29)

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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