Data engineering is 10 years behind the software engineering world and, in many ways, remains mired in "spreadsheet land," Danielle Morrill, general manager for the GitLab startup Meltano, said. As a way to make up for the lack of viable data engineering processes, Meltano can meet the needs of organizations without the in-house expertise of software developers who can invent a tailored solution from scratch. "A lot of people are great with spreadsheets and can't write code or think they can't write code, but conceptually, they already are," Morrill said. "So, I think the roadmap [for Meltano] is very much about bringing them along."

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast recording during the GitLab Commit conference in Brooklyn, New York in September, Morrill described how Meltano casts an as wide net as an open source alternative for data modeling, analysis and management.