Into the Hopper

In a role reversal, my friend and former colleague Brenton Mallon interviews me about my life, from growing up in West Virginia to my winding path through grad school, data science, and beyond.

Till Döhmen, AI Lead at MotherDuck with a PhD in databases, discusses AI-assisted SQL generation and DuckDB integrations. He talks about moving text-to-SQL from benchmarks to real tools. He highlights schema and documentation importance, MCP servers and skills for reliable agents, and ways to build trust and review model-generated queries.

Links Ben's Twitter [Ben’s Website]https://econoben.dev/) WorkHelix What Are AI Agents - O'Reilly Book Managing Memory for AI Agents - O'Reilly Book Bead Development Tool Subscribe RSS Feed Apple Podcasts Spotify Overcast In this episode of Into the Hopper, Tim talks with Ben Labishin from WorkHelix about AI agents and their impact on software development. Ben discusses AI memory management, practical strategies for using large language models, and the evolving role of developers in the age of AI. The conversation also addresses the balance between automation and foundational skills for junior engineers, offering valuable insights for professionals navigating this transformative landscape.

Find out more at podcast.tdhopper.com.

Jowanza Joseph, founder of Parakeet and former data scientist at Finicity and Adobe, shares his journey from corporate life to launching a compliance automation startup. He discusses the hurdles customers face transitioning to modern compliance solutions and the strong resistance to innovation among clients. The integration of AI tools in software development is also highlighted, balancing speed with code quality. Ultimately, he emphasizes the importance of security and certifications in building trust for AI products.

I talk with data science veteran Ravi Mody about his use of large language models in programming practice. Links: Ravi Mody on LinkedIn ChatGPT Claude.ai BBEdit Cursor Drew Conway's Data Science Venn Diagram

I talk with Jowanza Joseph about his new book Mastering Apache Pulsar: Cloud Native Event Streaming at Scale. Links: Jowanza's Pulsar talks Jowanza's Twitter Jowanza's website Pulsar homepage The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction by Jay Kreps StreamNative - Hosted Pulsar Datastax Astra Streaming - Hosted Pulsar Cloud Native Computing Foundation Pulsar Functions Pulsar IO Pulsar SQL Apache ZooKeeper Apache BookKeeper

I talk with Brenton Mallen about his career progression from ocean engineering to data science. Links: Brenton's Twitter Brenton's Instagram Brenton's Website Ocean Engineering at Florida Atlantic University

I talk with Roy Keyes about his imporant new book Hiring Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers. Links: Roy's Twitter Roy's Book Data Scientists at Work Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century by Thomas H. Davenport and D.J. Patil Building Data Science Teams by DJ Patil Find out more about Into the Hopper at podcast.tdhopper.com Music is Una Mañana Dorada by Silva de Alegria is licensed under a Attribution License. tdhopper.com — @tdhopper

Adam Laiacano and I talk with Willem Pienaar, software engineer at Tecton, about feature stores and his work on the Feast open source feature store library. Links: Willem's Twitter Adam's Twitter Feast: feature store for Machine Learning (2020 talk) Feast Tecton GoJek on Wikipedia featurestore.org Find out more about Into the Hopper at podcast.tdhopper.com Music is Una Mañana Dorada by Silva de Alegria is licensed under a Attribution License. tdhopper.com — @tdhopper