I recently watched Bill Gates Netflix documentary. Beyond his journey and Microsoft development, I learned his foundation helped a lot with polio eradication, water sanitation, and hygiene particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Though the foundation results are critiqued, he continues to believe that - no matter what - if a problem is not solved it's because we don't work hard enough on it.
It's interesting to see a billionaire such as Gates doesn’t solve problems only with money. He builds new relationships, finds engineer profiles, takes time to think and digest information1.
The point is: if you can buy something or exchange money for a service it’s proof that the problem behind it is already solved by someone. When money doesn’t suffice, real challenges go on.
Expected Contents
About managed service and good product strategy
This DBT blog post shows how managed service wars (ie. AWS, Azure, GCP, Snowflake, etc...), lock-in, and new products can be in balance to drive communities and domain maturity.
Here is a quote really valuable on DBT vision and product strategy :
Here’s something we know: dbt drives a tremendous amount of usage across several of the major cloud data platforms. That makes dbt and its community very strategic for these platforms. There are currently ~5,500 companies using dbt and this metric is tracking towards ~10,000 by the end of the year. This usage drives, in our estimates, billions of dollars of spend to the major platforms.
Here’s another thing we know: the major cloud providers love selling managedversions of opensource software.
Put those two things together and our expectation is that at least one, if not more, of the cloud platforms will launch some sort of managed dbt service in the coming year. This just seems like an inevitability as the community grows and exerts ever more gravity on the ecosystem.
This puts us in an interesting position! We work with each of the major cloud players above and love their products, but we also want to be prepared for this shift that we see as inevitable. As we see it, we have three options:
Continue on our current path. Hope that our current products and roadmap velocity are defensible enough to create a lasting independent business
Join forces with one of the cloud data platforms via M&A
Raise more money and build product fast. Recognize that our space is heating up and this forces us to accelerate our ability to build differentiated products
We chose option #3. We believe that our independence is critical as we chart the course for the future of dbt, the dbt Community, and for the practice of analytics engineering.
A very good newsletter
Benn Stancil newsletter is probably my favorite one in the data sphere. It's always deep in sense, well written, not too long. While it's mostly focused on "analytic engineering" there are a lot of things to keep from his posts.
Definitely, a newsletter to subscribe to.
The rise of worldscrapping
Adrian Hon has written a smart piece about the inevitability of AR glasses, “worldscraping”, and what it all means for the tech giants. Here’s a snippet:
It’s not hard to think of applications: archiving every word of every article and book you read for searching later, cataloging the movies and TV shows you’ve watched, saving interesting outfits and clothes you notice in shops or on passers-by, mapping your social graph based on the people you talk to on social media and in the real world, recording your cycle into work in case you get into accidents, and on and on. Of course, if no-one fancies wearing an always-on camera on your face, this is all dead in the water. But I suspect people will find the lure of AR directions and nametags and translations and instruction manuals and social media and games far too entertaining and useful to pass up, and all of these things will require that camera to be on.
Than Average
Imagine you are in a room with 100 strangers.
Imagine they're similar to your peers and neighbors.
ThanAverage proposes to compare yourself to the average.
Still, a remember: mean, median, or any other one figure summary are potentially dangerous and often hide all the patterns the data has to offer. Because they conceal by design, we risk error if we rely entirely on them.
Command Line Interface Guidelines
As you might already know, I really like terminal applications.
The command line is still the most versatile corner of the computer. It lets you pull back the curtain, see what’s really going on, and creatively interact with the machine at a level of sophistication and depth that GUIs cannot afford. It’s available on almost any laptop, for anyone who wants to learn it. It can be used interactively, or it can be automated. And, it doesn’t change as fast as other parts of the system. There is creative value in its stability.
Clig.dev is an open-source guide to help create command-line programs. It's pretty dense but really well written and complete. A good resource to review from time to time when building command-line applications.
The Blog Post
A 2.0 Path to Wealth
Beyond The Bracket
Wondering how we see our world through the lens of maps and satellite imagery has always been a strong feeling for me. Here is such a wonderful article2 on how satellite imagery - top-down perspective - presents a distorted perspective of our world.
Looking at these pictures is strange.
Still, I feel there is something natural in it. Oblique imagery is sometimes more like our everyday perspective and gives an immediate sense of topography.
In the same bit, I'm waiting for the next Apple Maps update with a new three-dimensional city-driving feature. It’s much more natural and will definitely help me to do not miss the exit of the highway…
A bit late on the schedule… August was busy on vacation and travel.
Starting a new position next month3, got a lot of blog post ideas and new resources to share here! Have to work on my schedule and writing capabilities.
He even takes one week holiday alone to read and think.
From the Nightingale publication which releases a premium membership and soon a print edition.
New position, new way of seeing things. Probably some views to share in the next issues…