Data Council Blog

Here's our November 2020 roundup of good reads and podcast episodes that might be relevant for your career in data:

1. Heroes of NLP: Quoc Le (Deeplearning.ai)

Here's our October 2020 roundup of good reads and podcast episodes that might be relevant to you as a data professional:

1. Multiplayer Editing: a Pragmatic Approach (Hex)

Created by Berlin-based developer Jan Oberhauser in 2019, n8n presents itself as “a free and open workflow automation tool”. Think of it as a locally hosted Zapier on steroids.

Here's our September 2020 roundup of good reads and podcast episodes that might be relevant to you as a data professional:

1. What Data Tools Don't Do (Data Council)

Our founder Pete Soderling co-authored a follow-on piece to his previous post with Great Expectations' core contributor Abe Gong and Partner at Amplify Partners Sarah Catanzaro, for which they had interviewed the makers of some of the hottest data tools. The focus is still the same: rather than what their data tools can do, we hear about what they don't do, as a way to better understand how they fit together. From ApertureData to Xplenty, this new installment covers 21 new tools, and you can read it here.

Here's our August 2020 roundup of good reads and great podcast episodes for anyone working with data:

1. Processing Large Datasets with Python

AI engineer and author J.T. Wolohan was recently a guest of the Heroku’s Code[ish] podcast to discuss the contents of his book, “Mastering Large Datasets with Python.” Listen to the episode here or read the transcript for some practical advice on using Python to deal with massive datasets, especially in the context of machine learning.

With more than 1,300 stars on GitHub, Apache Hudi is a great open source solution for companies with large analytical datasets to quickly ingest data onto HDFS or cloud storage.

Here's our July 2020 roundup of relevant links for data professionals, from blog posts to podcast episodes:

1. The State of Airflow

Software Engineering Daily recently invited Apache Airflow's creator Maxime Beauchemin and Astronomer engineers Vikram Koka and Ash Berlin-Taylor to discuss the state of Airflow. Listen to the podcast episode or read the transcript to hear their comments on Airflow's use cases, its purpose, the open source ecosystem, and more.

Apache Iceberg is an open table format for very large analytic datasets. You can use it with Presto or Spark to add tables that use a high-performance format that vows to work just like a SQL table.

Here's our June 2020 roundup of relevant links for data professionals, from blog posts to podcast episodes:

1. Self-Supervised Learning vs. AGI

"AGI does not exist — there is no such thing as general intelligence. We can talk about rat-level intelligence, cat-level intelligence, dog-level intelligence, or human-level intelligence, but not artificial general intelligence," Yann LeCun declared during an online session of the International Conference on Learning Representation (ICLR) 2020, which VentureBeat wrote about. Together with fellow Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, he advocated for pursuing humanlike AI through "self-supervised learning."