Freestyle Fridays - The Road Warrior. Why I Travel, Travel Tips, and More
I travel a TON, and the most frequent questions I get relate to traveling: Why I do it and any tips I have for traveling. Here, I answer those questions and more.
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20:50
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20:50
The Surprising Rise of FastMCP, a 1M+ Download/Day Hit w/ Jeremiah Lowin
Jeremiah Lowin, founder of Prefect , returns to the show to discuss the seismic shift in the data and AI landscape since our last conversation a few years ago. He shares the wild origin story of FastMCP, a project he started to create a more "Pythonic" wrapper for Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP).Jeremiah explains how this side project was incorporated into Anthropic's official SDK and then exploded to over a million downloads a day after MCP gained support from OpenAI and Google.He clarifies why this is an complementary expansion for Prefect, not a pivot , and provides a simple analogy for MCP as the "USB-C for AI agents". Most surprisingly, Jeremiah reveals that the primary adoption of MCP isn't for external products, but internally by data teams who are using it to finally fulfill the promise of the self-serve semantic layer and create a governable, "LLM-free zone" for AI tools.
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49:52
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49:52
Freestyle Fridays - Choosing Tools and Vendors, Having a Plan B, and More
I'm back, and give some notes from the road, thoughts on choosing tools and vendors, having a plan B for tools, and more.
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25:04
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25:04
Navigating Career Growth and the Content Gap w/ Yordan Ivanov
There's no shortage of technical content for data engineers, but a massive gap exists when it comes to the non-technical skills required to advance beyond a senior role. I sit down with Yordan Ivanov, Head of Data Engineering and writer of "Data Gibberish," to talk about this disconnect.We dive into his personal journey of failing as a manager the first time, learning the crucial "people" skills, and his current mission to help data engineers learn how to speak the language of business.Key areas we explore:The Senior-Level Content Gap: Yordan explains why his non-technical content on career strategy and stakeholder communication gets "terrible" engagement compared to technical posts, even though it's what's needed to advance.The Managerial Trap: Yordan's candid story about his first attempt at management, where he failed because he cared only about code and wasn't equipped for the people-centric aspects and politics of the role.The Danger of AI Over-reliance: A deep discussion on how leaning too heavily on AI can prevent the development of fundamental thinking and problem-solving skills, both in coding and in life.The Maturing Data Landscape: We reflect on the end of the "modern data stack euphoria" and what the wave of acquisitions means for innovation and the future of data tooling.AI Adoption in Europe vs. the US: A look at how AI adoption is perceived as massive and mandatory in Europe, while US census data shows surprisingly low enterprise adoption rates
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52:44
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52:44
The Agentic Future: How Streaming is Evolving for AI w/ Tyler Akidau
The world of data is being reset by AI, and the infrastructure needs to evolve with it. I sit down with streaming legend Tyler Akidau to discuss how the principles of stream processing are forming the foundation for the next generation of "agentic AI" systems.Tyler, who was an AI cynic until recently, explains why he's now convinced that AI agents will fundamentally change how businesses operate and what problems we need to solve to deploy them safely.Key topics we explore:From Human Analytics to Agentic Systems: How data architectures built for human analysis must be re-imagined for a world with thousands of AI agents operating at machine speed.Auditing Everything: Why managing AI requires a new level of governance where we must record all data an agent touches, not just metadata, to diagnose its complex and opaque behaviorThe End of Windowing's Dominance: Tyler reflects on the influential Dataflow paper he co-authored and explains why he now sees a table-based abstraction as a more powerful and user-friendly model than focusing on windowing.The D&D Alignment of AI: Tyler's brilliant analogy for why enterprises are struggling to adopt AI: we're trying to integrate "chaotic" agents into systems built for "lawful good" employees.A Reset for the Industry: Why the rise of AI feels like the early 2010s of streaming, where the problems are unsolved and everyone is trying to figure out the answers.
What happens when a best-selling author and "recovering data scientist" gets a microphone? This podcast.
I'm Joe Reis, and each week I broadcast from wherever I am in the world, sharing candid thoughts on the data, tech, and AI industry.
Sometimes it's a solo rant. Other times, I'm chatting with the smartest people I know.
If you're looking for an unfiltered perspective on the state of AI, data, and tech, you've found it.
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