The Data Stack Show

On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas and Eric finish part two of a conversation about Earnnest, a digital platform originally designed for facilitating real estate transactions. In the previous episode, they talked with the CTO and co-founder Daniel Jeffords, and in this week’s episode, they talked with the other co-founder, Andrew Elster, CIO and chief architect. Andrew describes more about Earnnest’s stack and their decision to utilize Elixir and talks about their vision for scaling up their product.

Key topics in the conversation include:

• Andrew’s journey from electrical engineering, to avoiding pirates in oceanic oil exploration, to starting Earnnest (2:57)
• Keeping the platform flexible to expand beyond real estate transactions (10:24)
• Being adaptable to support existing workflows (18:33)
• The evolution of the database and implementing event sourcing (25:01)
• Using a functional language like Elixir (30:54)
• Developing Earnnest with scale in mind (37:33)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This week on The Data Stack Show, Kostas and Eric are joined by Axel Delafosse, founder and CEO of Pool, a messaging app designed to help couples spend less time deciding what to do and spend more time together. Axel shares his story of how he went from having his idea being shot down in person by Paul Graham to being accepted for Y Combinator. While Pool is still a young startup, Axel offers wise insight from lessons he’s learned along the way.

Highlights from this week’s episode include:

• Pool Messenger, “the ultimate antidote to decision paralysis” (2:50)
• Pitching to Paul Graham and applying to YC (6:17)
• The importance of the co-founder relationship (14:01)
• The YC experience and losing Facebook’s API (17:37)
• Products die, relationships last (22:05)
• Breaking down the data stack (28:50)
• Using data and conversations with users to evaluate the experience (36:12)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This week on The Data Stack Show, Kostas and Eric chat with Daniel Jeffords, CTO and co-founder of Earnnest, a financial tool for the real estate industry. Earnnest’s digital platform allows buyers to securely and electronically deposit funds directly to an escrow holder and keeps agents, buyers, and escrow holders in the loop with automated emails and tracking information.

Highlights from this week’s episode include:

• Earnnest’s approach to the way payments are handled in an antiquated real estate industry (2:12)
• Clearing up the differences in the way money changes hands, ACH, wire, and checks (12:39)
• How Earnnest works and who are the involved parties (21:06)
• Disrupting a highly regulated industry (24:24)
• Emphasizing security and transparency (30:09)
• Erlang, Elixir, Dwolla and more. How Earnnest uses data (33:40)
• Trying very hard to store very little data (42:58)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This week on The Data Stack Show, Reza Shafii, vice president of products at Kong Inc. discusses open source projects and products with Kostas and Eric. Kong is a cloud connectivity company best known for being the creator and primary supporter of Kong, the most widely adopted open-source micro service API gateway.

Highlights from this week’s episode include:

• Being a self-proclaimed middleware geek (2:17)
• Middleware explained (5:41)
• Kong as a company, open source project, and a brand (10:44)
• Drawing the lines between the open source and property parts of a SaaS platform (24:22)
• Dealing with the extra friction in adopting middleware from the bottom up (33:02)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode of The Data Stack Show, hosts Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds talk with Nicholas Ziech-Lopez, director of product strategy at MessageGears. MessageGears is designed to reduce data friction for marketers by connecting directly to a brand’s data source and using their live data. This episode centered around the world of CDPs and where MessageGears fits in that space.

Highlights from this week’s episode include:

• Nicholas’ arrival at MessageGears and the company’s background (2:20)
• MessageGears data sources (6:52)
• Accessing the data warehouses (9:19)
• Coordination and crossover of data and marketing roles (20:57)
• Being a customer marketing platform (31:43)
• Dealing with messy data (36:04)
• Bridging the physical and digital world with consumers (43:49)
• What’s coming up next for MessageGears (51:09)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This week’s episode of The Data Stack Show features a conversation with hosts Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds and guest Jack Naglieri, founder and CEO of Panther Labs. Panther, a San Francisco based startup, is an open platform that helps security teams detect and respond to breaches in cloud-native environments, providing a modern alternative to traditional SIEMs.

Highlights from this week’s episode include:

• Introduction to Jack and Panther Labs (2:33)
• The different pillars of data security (10:24)
• Onboarding process for a company using Panther (18:40)
• Thinking of security as a data problem (24:55)
• Using S3 and other infrastructure suggestions that will be helpful in the long run (32:16)
• Use cases for analyzing past and real-time data (39:20)
• Panther’s data stack (42:54)
• Open source technology being helpful for the community (47:57)
• The future for Panther (54:39)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds are joined by CTO and Co-Founder of Holistics, Huy Nguyen. Holistics takes an approach to business intelligence and data analytics that they call DataOps. They focus on data team productivity and company-wide access to insights. 

Important points in the conversation included:

• Introduction to Huy and Holistics (3:12)
• Approaching BI with more than just visualization (8:59)
• How friction between different roles within an organization is addressed by Holistics (15:20)
• Holistics as a complementary tool (23:25)
• Describing their own data stack (34:47)
• History of BI and trends for the future (39:33)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds are joined by Slapdash co-founder Ivan Kanevski. Slapdash describes itself as the operating system for work. Slapdash emphasizes reducing the time people spend controlling their computer in relation to the time they spend expressing their intent.

Key topics discussed were:

• Starting Slapdash and expanding on tools from working at Facebook (3:31)
• Being client agnostic and working with the tools that people bring to the job (7:35)
• Distinctions between mouse-centric and keyboard-centric users (12:58)
• Slapdash’s approach to collecting data (16:08)
• Building Slapdash to scale and using Postgres (19:45)
• Using a graph model and a focus on efficiency (24:50)
• Challenges of reducing latency (29:35)
• Opening up Slapdash to be programmable (38:17)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds chat with Mason Stewart, the lead engineer at Bookshop.org. Bookshop is an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores. Their hope is to help strengthen the fragile ecosystem and margins around bookselling and keep local bookstores an integral part of our culture and communities.

Among other topics, today’s conversation talked about making what some might call boring decisions with the data stack that are better described as mature decisions and the intertwining of human interaction with data for problem solving and recommendations.

• Background on Mason and Bookshop.org (3:28)
• Technical challenges of keeping up with a rapidly expanding business (10:00)
• Interacting with data from fulfillment partners (14:36)
• Data schema for books and dealing with Elasticsearch (24:46)
• Human intervention in recognizing problems and exceptions (31:38)
• In-depth look at Bookshop’s data stack (37:06)
• Using curated lists from bookstores instead of algorithmic recommendations (43:50)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds connect with IFTTT data scientist Peter Darche. IFTTT is a free platform that helps all your products and services work better together through automated tasks. Their discussion covered a lot of ground involving their data stack, their use cases and clearing up once and for all how to pronounce the company’s name.

• Background on IFTTT (2:12)
• Peter tells the proper way to pronounce IFTTT (3:34)
• An overview of IFTTT’s technological architecture (6:14)
• The uses of data and analytics at IFTTT (8:04)
• Constructing the data stack (10:11)
• Dealing with challenges (15:20)
• Best practices for communicating with internal teams about the data (23:04)
• Discussing functional data engineering (26:05)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.