The Joe Reis Show

As I travel this Fall, I'm reminded that most people don't work at fancy tech companies. Most people work at traditional companies with "boring" data and tech stacks. And that's OK. Boring is good.

Jordan Morrow has written a ton, including four books. We chat about the process of writing books, the ins and outs of working with a publisher, the role of AI in writing, and much more. If you're interested in writing a book, this is a crash course in what you should know. Enjoy!

Venkat Subramaniam is a programmer, author, speaker, and founder of Agile Developer, Inc. I've seen him speak several times, and was always blown away by his passion and technical depth. So, I was excited to have him on the podcast.

We chat about agile development in the real world, learning to do less, and much more. Venkat is extremely wise, and I very much enjoyed our discussion. Enjoy!

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vsubramaniam

Twitter: https://x.com/venkat_s

Uncle Rico is a character in the movie Napoleon Dynamite, who is stuck in the past, reminiscing about his days as a high school football star. If only he'd won the game and went to the state championship. Some of the data industry reminds me of Uncle Rico.

During a recent panel, there was a question about whether AI can help with data management (governance, modeling, etc).

Some people were quick to dismiss this, saying that machines are no substitute for humans in their understanding and translating of "the business" to data.

Yet why are we still perpetually stuck in the mode of "80% of data projects fail"? Might AI/ML help data management move out of its rut? Or will it stay stuck in the past?

Also, please check out my new data engineering course on Coursera!

https://www.coursera.org/learn/intro-to-data-engineering

Paco Nathan is a national treasure. He's not only an OG in the field of AI, but he's also instrumental in early hacker and cyberpunk culture.

When I first met Paco, it suddenly clicked that I'd seen his name in various cyberpunk and alternative zines back in the 1990s. We have a chat all sorts of crazy stuff, and I feel like we only got to 5% of the stories..

Bethany Lyons and I chat about disrupting the recruitment industry, startups, and the future of work.

Last week I talked about how good you have to be at your job. Yesterday's OpenAI announcement of it's "reasoning" model, o1, got me thinking about how good AI needs to be to do our jobs.

Ergest Xheblati is a data architect and author of Minimum Viable SQL Patterns. We chat about the opportunities and challenges of SQL, things that don't change in tech and data, writing and publishing books, and much more.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ergestx/

Other links: https://www.ergestx.com/links/

Dylan Anderson is a UK-based data strategist. We chat about bridging the gap between data and strategy, why talking about business value is a waste of time, and much more.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylansjanderson/

Substack: https://thedataecosystem.substack.com/

While speaking to one of my best friends, who's worked as a pilot for over 30 years, he mentioned that a "good" pilot doesn't crash the plane. In tech and data, "good" is viewed differently. How good you have to be at your job?