Podcast

Why are we so bad at this modern data stack? w/ Chad Sanderson

61 minutes

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About this episode

Imagine sitting down at a restaurant. Your food is already on the table, and the waiter hands you a menu of different dishes and silverware you can use to consume your meal. That’s a completely backwards experience, but it’s kind of how data architecture works today. We have our data in cheap storage, and then we purchase software that helps us consume it. Is this also wrong?

In this special episode, Tim and Juan are joined by Chad Sanderson, Head of Product, Data Platform at Convoy, to discuss whether we’re incorrectly architecting our modern data stack.

This episode features

  • Lessons learned from Amazon and Facebook on building services before data

  • How to align your data team with business goals

  • Getting data architecture right often requires paying down legacy debt. What’s something you recently purchased that you maybe shouldn't have?

Key takeaways

  • When you build on top of the swamp, it sinks.

  • Data consumer will always have a gap between the question that they are asking and what came from the source system.

  • “Knowledge layer or descriptive layer” - as close a representation of the real world as possible.

Special guests

Photo of Chad Sanderson.

Chad Sanderson

Head of Data Product, Convoy

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