Data Council Blog

Alyssa Frazee tells us about the unicorn data skills she's honed on the job.

How open source allowed Airbnb to rebuild their expensive BI tool in less than one developer year

Granted Maxime Beauchemin isn't your average data engineer. As any Bay Area engineer worth their salt knows, anyone who worked on data at Facebook receives (deserves) a certain outsized respect from their peers.

How Everyone's Favorite PaaS Operates Kafka at Scale

Druid is a modern data store built for analytics use-cases. As the volume of data has exploded, and companies have sought deeper insights from their data, ad-hoc analytics have become difficult as more data is buried in distributed systems like Hadoop & Spark. The query model for these systems can result in long latencies making them sub-optimal for interactive analytics applications.

How many different file formats does your ETL system need to parse? For many data pipelines, several well-defined formats will suffice. Things break, and at times require manual intervention, but not so often that a couple engineers can't keep tabs on the system and keep things running relatively smoothly.

Shopping for geeks can be stressful, especially if you don’t know what to get someone. Take a data scientist or engineer for example: do you get him or her gadgets, clothing, or an experiential gift? Should it be practical or fun? How about familiar or unique?