In this episode of Unapologetically Technical, I interview Semih Salihoglu, Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo and co-founder and CEO of Kuzu. Semih is a researcher and entrepreneur with a background in distributed systems and databases. He shares his journey from a small city in Turkey to the hallowed halls of Yale University, where he studied computer science and economics. This path led him to a formative experience as a software engineer at Google in New York City, providing him with crucial industry insights. He then pursued his doctoral studies at Stanford University, de ..read more

In this episode of Unapologetically Technical, I interview David Jayatillake, the Head of AI at Cube. David is an AI manager who spent many years delivering analytics and AI solutions. He discusses his time at Worldpay, where he progressed from an analyst to a pricing manager, and how he leveraged data engineering to optimize processes and drive profitability. He also talks about his leadership roles at Elevate Credit and List, where he built cross-functional teams and implemented innovative data solutions. Finally, he shares his experience as a co-founder at Delphy Labs and how it led him t ..read more

We’re down to the last month of the year, but we’re never leaving without a new episode of the Unapologetically Technical! In this episode, I interview Frances Perry, the Head of Engineering at MotherDuck.  Frances Perry is an engineering manager who spent many years as a heads-down coder creating various distributed systems used in Google and Google Cloud. Frances shares her insights from 16 years at Google, including the development of Flume and Cloud Dataflow, and discusses the challenges and rewards of scaling engineering teams. The conversation also explores the future of data proc ..read more

https://youtu.be/Riy8860hHSo Unapologetically Technical’s newest episode is now live! In this episode of Unapologetically Technical, I interview Cliff Crosland, the co-founder and CEO of Scanner.dev.  Cliff Crosland is a data engineer passionate about helping people wrangle massive log volumes. He sees logs as a treasure trove of insights and believes effective log analysis is critical in […] The post Unapologetically Technical Episode 14 – Cliff Crosland first appeared on Jesse Anderson ..read more

Survey Changes Over Time Between 2020 and 2024 (see 2020, 2023, and 2024 for each year’s information), I’ve been conducting a data teams survey. I wanted to dedicate an entire post to examining the change in data teams over time. Total Value Creation The most important question I ask each year concerns data team value creation. I break the question into two parts: “How successful would the business say your projects are?” and “How successful do you think your big data projects are?” This division into two questions is essential to distinguishing what a technical person thinks from what th ..read more

In the spring of 2024, I ran a new survey to gather more data for my Data Teams book and update my 2023 and 2020 surveys. In total, we had 81 respondents. This survey was designed to get information about how management uses data teams, the value they’re creating, and how they’re creating it. The survey asked about the best and worst practices that teams are using or experiencing. We rounded out the survey by asking about the economic effects on data teams. In this post, I’ll analyze the results and what they mean.   GenAI How are you using Generative AI/LLMs/Chat GPT? One of the mos ..read more

https://youtu.be/rjpXnaabaqo Unapologetically Technical’s newest episode is now live! In this episode of Unapologetically Technical, I interview Jeff Chou, CEO and co-founder of Sync Computing.  Jeff, who holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and a postdoc from MIT, shares his unique journey from academia to startup life, and how his experience with simulations shaped the vision […] The post Unapologetically Technical Episode 13 – Jeff Chou first appeared on Jesse Anderson ..read more

This video covers the latest announcements from StreamNative, Confluent, and WarpStream. We discuss communication protocols, how they’re used, and what they mean for you. We also discuss the various systems using Kafka’s protocol. Finally, we discuss the announcements about writing to Iceberg and DeltaLake directly from the broker and what that means for costs and operational ease.   It’s conference season, and we’re interpreting the latest announcements from the various streaming vendors. This post will consider the recent StreamNative, Confluent, and WarpStream announcements. &nbs ..read more

Unapologetically Technical’s newest episode is now live! In this episode of Unapologetically Technical, I interview AJ Hunyady, the founder and CEO of InfinyOn. We talked about his early experiences with networking systems, such as creating firewalls, email, and web servers, and how those prepared him for data work. We chatted about the various implications of Generative AI and LLMs for the current and future coders of the world. We talked about the difficulty of using batch systems in security and the need for real-time actions. He shared his views on containerization and Kubernetes conso ..read more

In this episode of Unapologetically Technical, I interview Hubert Dulay, the author of Streaming Data Mesh and Developer Advocate at StarTree. We talked about his early experience with web backends like CORBA and SOAP and how those prepared him for data work. He shares his advice for those with web development skills to transition into data and what it’s like for a person leaving a company after a long tenure there. We discuss his time at Cloudera and Confluent and how the data industry has changed over time. We talk about his recent experience with Flink and StarTree. We go in-depth into ..read more