My Experience at Data Council Austin 2023: Day 2
First off, really appreciate the great support from the readers. I set very low expectation for this blog series. If you scan the blog briefly and have some takeaways, or just leave a rough impression of Data Council, it’ll make my very happy.
This is my second day for the conference. To some degrees, it’s very different than the first day. There are some similarities for sure (say a lot of parties and I attended 2 tonights).
Let me show you this very useful handbook first.
In many conferences, there are special mobile apps for you to check session schedule or select which session you will go or even book the reservation (that’s why I am not a big fan of reInvent). On my 2nd day of the conference, I found this handbook is so useful. It’s not high-tech at all, just works very well.
Today’s themes are AI, Analytics, and Culture/Community. I personally work in the streaming data infra domain, so I enjoyed a lot of talks yesterday and look forwards to the streaming track tomorrow. I am not too excited about AI/ChatGPT. I do like strong engineering culture, but I don’t like to talk a lot about it. So most of my time was on Analytics track and meeting various cofounders/partners/investors.
I only slept 6 hours last night. I published the blog at 12:30am.
Waked up at 6:30am and head to the first #StreamBrew meetup in a very impressive Tacos place (second #StreamBrew meetup will be tomorrow evening). I was happy to chat with my friends at Bytewax, a stream processing engine/SDK purely in Python. Zander Matheson, the founder, is originally from Vancouver 🇨🇦, now lives in California 🇺🇸. This open-source project provides lightweight solution to process streaming data just with Python. PyFlink or PySpark may work sometimes but the experience and infra cost will be very different. We chatted a lot about OSS, GTM, MTB(Mountain Biking), and happy to meet a few other folks in the Tacos shop who also attend the Data Council and had a group run.
Spicy topics. Nice tacos. Friendly smiles. A really good start of my day.
What really made my day was the moment Pete mentioned our company (together with others startup companies) during the opening.
That’s why I like Data Council. It’s so approachable and friendly. Pete sent emails to attendees last week asking whether any startup companies want to be mentioned in the conference, and there is a simple Google Form for that. I am not sure what’ll be the cost or process of it. Just share our website and 1 line description. No response until I got this happy surprise. Pete just showed such slides in the morning and afternoon kickoff meetings, and read that company/product description for us. I hardly cannot imagine this would happen in other conferences. Thank for being so supportive for startup companies.
From 9:15 to 10 was the keynote panel with big brains from Jasper/GitHub/Databricks/Hex. I don’t have many comments for that.
The first talk in the Analytics track was “How to be a 10x Analyst”, from Robert Yi @ Hyperquery. I am lucky enough to be an early adopter of Hyperquery, and I learnt a lot from him personally. If you have the chance to watch the recording, please do. You will be smiling a lot, especially for the first 10 minutes. I don’t want to spoil it.
I joined part of a workshop for Census, a reserve-ETL SaaS. Very impressive web UI and powerful product to sync/map data from one system to the other.
When I got back to the Analytics track, Julian Hyde was talking about his extension to SQL for better cubing and metrics. Julian seems to be a serious guy but actually very friendly. He setup a cool personal rule that he only attends the conference in which his session/paper is selected. He has some strong opinions which I cannot share here without his consent. But at least I think his approach to enhance SQL for cubig/metrics will be more acceptable than the Malloy project shared yesterday. Both inventors came from Google/Looker. Let’s wait a bit longer to see how SQL evolves.
Between the sessions, many of us went to the restrooms. Two fun elements: 1️⃣ many times there were a long line for men’s room (we definitely should improve gender diversity in the data domain) 2️⃣ some smart folks shared the business cards for company/product in the restrooms. 😂👍🤞
The other fun fact I noticed is that not all data geeks like to social. There must be some folks who standing all day to talk to various folks in the hallway. There are also many folks who silently eat lunch alone. Don’t get me wrong. I like it and appreciate the Data Council provides various options and facilities to make (almost) everyone comfortable. Say, this is the photo I took at noon. For people like me who is lack of sleep and had some overdue tasks, it’s a nice place to get a little break and get things done.
During the lunch I happen to meet someone from Voltron Data, one of the key companies behind Apache Arrow. JDBC is the default option to connect to database for Java apps, but I know many folks also think it’s not modern enough to talk to those column-based databases. Before the conference I heard more than twice people were wondering whether we can “upgrade” JDBC to leverage Apache Arrow. In today’s “standup” lunch, I was happy to hear Voltron folks are working on ADBC and they are going to talk more on 2:15pm tomorrow. 🎉
I didn’t attend many sessions in the afternoon, and enjoyed good conversations with trusted friends and new friends. Thank you everyone who offered great advices to startup companies like us.
As last night, I joined 2 parties in a row. The first one was in a very fancy place with best foods I had this week. Second one was great too. When I walked from first one to the second one, another good surprise I talked to one of key leads for Rust (the programming language) and she shared some very interesting ideas/facts. Austin is full of surprise.
I cannot remember or cannot blog too much for those conversations in the parties. Again, that’s a key part of joining an offline conference. Between 🍻, we were joking whether there are more startup founders than data engineers in this conference. Someone recommended Gartner data and analytics summit. There should be more potential buyers, with a lot more budget. The only problem is that the average age of Gartner summit attendees will be X years older than who join this event.
Tomorrow is going to be great. Three tracks:
- Data streaming
- Building Data Products
- Data Engineering & Infra
I want to join them all. 😂 Have to make some hard choices. You may come back to check my messy summary same time tomorrow.
