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The Zen of AWS

Confusing is better than clear Complex is better than simple Complicated is better than complex Nested is better than flat, especially in documentation For documentation, all paths lead to stack overflow. Readability doesn’t count, especially in documentation There should be many–and preferably way more than two–non obvious ways to do the same task Predictability is good, except for…

All Great Things Part 2: The Founder's Dilemma

I recently posted an article about the demise of DataDistillr. It was painful to write and I was worried that by doing so, it would make me look very foolish. After all, I was documenting what mistakes I felt I made that caused the failure of DataDistillr. I did get some heat from some folks in an online community which I joined. I won’t name names, or print quotes but it wasn’t kind to say the…

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All Great Things...

Well, this is the post I’d hoped to never write, but alas, we’ve reached the conclusion that it’s time to shut down DataDistillr. We gave it our best, but in the end we weren’t able to achieve product-market fit. What Happened? I think several things led to our demise. Basically, it can be boiled down to changing market conditions, not building the right product and not selling what we had…

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Why You Shouldn't Rely on GPT to Write Code

A lot of people have tried out ChatGPT and other LLMs for code their code writing abilities. My theory was that the LLMs would be really good at writing code to do things they’ve seen before, but not so good at things that were completely new. I started my experiments by asking ChatGPT to write me a function in python to geolocate a phone number. ChatGPT 3.5 did a relatively poor job of this, so…

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#Apache Drill #Data Science #gpt

Tests in a GenAI World

I teach a graduate level data management class at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Let me preface this by saying that the midterm and final exams for my course are all online, open book, open notes. Despite this, and despite all my warnings about the dire consequences of plagiarism, I routinely catch students cheating on exams. I really love teaching, and it is very…

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A Tribute to My Grandmother and the Greatest Generation

April was very hard for me. At the beginning of the month, my grandmother, Irene Givre, passed away at the age of 95. For those who know me, I lost my mother when I was 10 to a brain tumor and the subsequent years of my life were chaotic and tumultuous to say the least. That’s a story for another day. My grandparents really stepped up and took care of me during those times and as a result, I was…

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Announcing Drill 1.21: New Connectors, Functions and Much Better Stability

The Apache Drill PMC is pleased to announce a milestone release of Apache Drill. Since the last release of Drill the team has been hard at work quashing bugs and making overall functionality improvements. The TL;DR includes the following: New connectors including Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Microsoft Access, GoogleSheets, and Box Efficient cross-cloud query capability Greatly improved access…

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It's The Assumptions That Get You

I’ve had a number of conversations recently that have highlighted to me how not understanding people’s assumptions can really hamper conversations. I’m going to highlight questions from two recent conversations, one was with a VC and the other was from a grant for which we applied. My biggest frustration in all this is that how wrong assumptions on both parties prevented deals from moving…

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Hanukah of Data: Solving a Data Challenge with AI and SQL

A colleague of mine recently gave me a data challenge called the Hanukkah of Data (https://hanukkah.bluebird.sh/about/) which has 8 challenges. I decided to try them out in DataDistillr. The challenges use a fictional data set which consists of four tables: a customer table, a product table, an order table and a table linking orders to products. The data was very representative of what a customer…

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ChatGPT, Meet DataDistillr! You'll have lots to discuss!

ChatGPT, Meet DataDistillr! You’ll have lots to discuss!

Happy New Year everyone! I’m pretty excited about this. Like every other tech geek out there, I was experimenting with ChatGPT when it was announced in December of 2022. Initially I was amazed at how well the AI appeared to work, and somewhat terrified with what people could actually do with it. I teach a database class at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) and I was really…

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We Launched! Our Beta is Now Live!! (So I Launched a Startup Part 18)

Well, that day has finally come! After months of testing, speaking with customers and investors, our public beta is finally live! Almost exactly two years ago, I quit my job at JP Morgan, and launched DataDistillr and last week, we turned on our app for the world to try out. I would be honored if you tried it out. You can try it for free at https://app.datadistillr.io. For a founder, this is…

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Joining Difficult Data: How to Join Data on Extracted Domains (So I Launched a Startup Pt. Whatever)

One of the big challenges facing many data analysts is joining disparate data sets. Recently at DataDistillr, we assisted a prospective customer with an interesting problem which I thought I’d share. In this case, the customer had data from an internal database which had URLs in it, and was looking to create a combined report with some data from SalesForce. The only key that these data sets had…

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5 Ways Google Sheets SDK Could be better. A Tutorial on How to Integrate with Google Sheets. (Startup Part 17)

Googlesheets (GS) is one of those data sources that I think most data scientists use and probably dread a little. Using GS is easy enough, but what if a client gives you data in GS? Or worse, what if they have a lot of data in GS and other data that isn’t? Personally, whenever I’ve encountered data in GS, I’ve usually just downloaded it as a CSV and worked on it from there. This works fine, but…

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Using DataDistillr to Clean and Analyze Data (So I launched a Startup: Pt. 15)

My Medium feed thankfully has returned to tech articles and one popped up that caught my attention: Data Analysis project- Using SQL to Clean and Analyse Data. I created my startup DataDistillr to help in such situations and I was wondering could we accomplish the same tasks in less time and effort. In this article, the author takes some data from Real World Fake Data in a CSV file and does the…

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Excel vs. The Data Lake (So I Launched a Startup Pt. 14)

It seems I always start my posts with “it’s been a while since I last posted…”. Well, it has. The truth is that during the month of April, I did something I hadn’t done in a while: took a vacation. That was nice, but then I got COVID (not fun), which everyone in my household got. Then I went to Singapore. More on that later. I’ve also been very heads down with some coding and technical stuff…

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Data Pioneers vs. Data Settlers (Startup Pt. 13)

I just got back from a data conference organized by the Data Council, which took place in Austin, TX. It was the first data conference I’ve attended since the pandemic started and it was really great to be able to attend and meet many colleagues from around the country and the world. I know I’ve said this many times, but I always come back from conferences feeling very inspired and usually with a…

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So I Launched a Startup, Pt 12: MLOps and Burst Coding

I’ve written about this before but as a technical CEO and Co-Founder, my days are usually filled with meetings of various types. My day starts with a daily standup about sales and growth and can take any number of directions. Mondays usually have sprint planning meetings, Tuesdays exec meetings, Thursdays are meetings with investors etc. The unfortunate result is that I don’t have large amounts…

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