Monday Morning Data Chat - The Finale!

Joe Reis (0:01)

Happy Monday.

Matt Housley (0:03)

Happy Monday, how's it going, Joe? How's your jet lag?

Joe Reis (0:07)

I'm pretty tired, but...

Matt Housley (0:09)

I imagine. Apologies to everyone. I've got a cough, so I'll probably be sucking on cough drops a bit to try to not cough into the microphone, but mostly whole these days.

Joe Reis (0:18)

Yeah. So you're sick, I'm jet lagged. This will be a great show. You know, finishing out on a great note here.

Matt Housley (0:26)

I mean, we got to maintain the Wayne's World vibes to the end, right?

Joe Reis (0:29)

Well, that's kind of how we started it, right? I mean, it was, I think, very much you and I recording conversations that we would have anyway, right?

Matt Housley (0:41)

Exactly. Yeah.

Joe Reis (0:42)

Yeah. Walk us through, you know, kind of the early days. Like, what was it like for you to do a podcast? Because you think you're more of the reclusive end of the duo.

Matt Housley (0:54)

I think the first one we did, refresh my memory here, but I think the first one we did, I was in New Jersey and you were in Utah. And so we like remotely recorded it. It wasn't live. And then like one of my nieces ran through the shot or something like, we got to re-record.

Joe Reis (1:08)

Oh, that's funny. I don't think I remember that. But I think I do remember that now. Yeah.

Matt Housley (1:12)

Yeah. And then later on, I like recorded from Oregon at one point. And it was just, it was usually just us. And it was talking about who knows what at the time. We'd have to go back to the early days and see.

Joe Reis (1:22)

Well, I mean, a conversation though, right? So I mean, you know, for the audience out there, and thanks to, good to see everybody showing up here. The old, let me see here. We got a lot of people, too many to name. So anyway, thanks everyone for coming today. Thanks. Yeah. And that's Lana over there. That's my dog. So she's pretty cool. So anyway, yeah, I think when we started, we'd often go on walks. You know, I think this was during COVID, so we wanted a chance to get outside. But I mean, the types of conversations we ended up recording, these are the things we'd talk about basically for years before we were running. So we ran it, we have company Ternary Data, which we'll talk about in a bit. So that was their data engineering, data architecture consulting firm. It was Matt and me for a long time.

And yeah, so I mean, but you know, I think really rewinding, I met Matt, what was it, 2017, I believe. I think that's right. Hit it off, like we realized we were kind of the yin and yang of a personality wise. I don't think we could pick two opposite personalities. But we nerded out, I think, found a really kindred connection with technology and data specifically. So we'd go with, have just sort of endless conversations that would last for hours about, Lord knows even what topics, a lot of them, I think.

Matt Housley (2:46)

It was an interesting time in the industry. I mean, it's been an interesting time for the last several years. Things have changed really fast and there have been a lot of big shifts. But when I got really into the data side of things, as opposed to the data science side of things, like data engineering, data processing, it was just when the shift from Hadoop to cloud was happening. And so that's where I started to think, okay, this is actually a good place to be in consulting because all these companies want to migrate their data systems to the cloud. They want to rethink these systems in a more scalable fashion, but they don't have the resources to do so. So that's the kind of stuff we talked about and we talked about on the show, and that's kind of what the foundation of the company and the book was.

Joe Reis (3:27)

Yeah, I think we found a connection in that. I think that you had sort of a disdain for the kind of the legacy big data era and tooling. I think from the perspective that there was a lot of ceremony and a lot of bullshit with that. And so I think you felt like you found religion in some ways. And it's good to meet a guy who's found religion or Satanism.

Matt Housley (3:54)

Yeah, something like that. Well, I think at the time, part of the problem was that the promise, well, there are two main promises of Fadoub specifically. So one was that you could process data at amazing scale. And the second was that it was supposed to be cheap. And we found in practice that the company struggled so much with basic data quality issues or use case issues that like they either weren't processing that much data or they weren't really using it for anything. And then we also found that it turned out to be very, very expensive because the cluster was cheap, but like the people to maintain it would cost a lot of money. And it was just like constant, you know, babysitting and monkeying with things to keep the system running.