Phone numbers are seven digits because humans retain about four things plus or minus three.
Roger Magoulas on why 47-tab dashboards don't work. Stakeholders will remember none of it.
Recce - Trust, Verify, Ship
Helping data teams preview, validate, and ship data changes with confidence.
Next week: Fall in love with your data 💕 The Data Valentine Challenge February 9–13
💘 5 days, 5 companies, 5 real fixes for your data stack
Data teams are drowning. You don't need another course. You need quick wins.
Join us for 30-60-minute daily challenges:
💗 Fix what's broken
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Featuring: #Recce | #Greybeam | #dltHub | #DatabaseTycoon | #Bauplan
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What percentage of your data team's time goes to pipeline maintenance versus exploratory analysis?
Roger Magoulas argues the ratio determines whether you generate insight or just keep the lights on.
Data engineers are so buried in pipeline maintenance, feed monitoring, and DAG management that they cannot shift into insight mode.
All reaction. No anticipation. Roger Magoulas on how the value gets crowded out.
Mode raised 80 million over 10 years and resisted being called a BI tool until the market forced consolidation. Lesson: technical tools drift toward BI because wall-to-wall deployments require value for non-technical users.
LLMs are non-deterministic. But the code they generate is deterministic.
Roger Magoulas: prompt for SQL that monitors your pipelines. Run the code. Sidestep the hallucination problem.
🎧 Full episode: https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/data-renegades/ep-6-from-big-data-to-curiosity-driven-insight-with-roger-magoulas
"I had casually said, I think I could build a data warehouse in 90 days. My boss said, OK, go to it."
Listen to Roger Magoulas on how curiosity and chance encounters beat formal training.
New episode of Data Renegades podcast is live with guest Roger Magoulas. He coined the term "big data" and has 30 experience years of building data teams.
Check it out on your favorite podcast app, youtube, or directly here: https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/data-renegades
Benn predicts BI tools get displaced by LLMs analyzing support tickets, not by better dashboards. Execs already decide based on customer stories they heard, not numbers. AI just makes qualitative analysis scale.
Watch the full clip: https://youtube.com/shorts/vZjaLv7JaMY
Mode's product strategy: Don't average 50 customer opinions into a Frankenstein feature set. Find the single most opinionated user who gets it and build exactly what they want. Character beats consensus.
"You have to write it over and over until you can stand it. Your bar isn't too high. Getting through the point where it stops being fun is how you make it good."
Benn Stancil shared this quote about writing, but it applies to building products. People assume if they don't like what they've made, it's because they're too critical. The real answer is they haven't gone far enough.
Your bar isn't too high. Getting through the point where it stops being fun is how you make it good.
Check out the full episode on youtube: https://youtu.be/azQPAb1V-1E
Benn's hot take: data analysis is overrated. The modern data stack solved infrastructure problems, but the real problem is analysis itself is fundamentally hard. For most B2B SaaS companies with limited scale, the signal just isn't there.
The hardest problem in data engineering: analytics work has no production boundaries. Data artifacts slowly expire. Nobody knows what's still supported. This creates unmaintainable tech debt that spirals forever.
Mode started as a SQL query editor in a browser. No market research. They just built what worked at Yammer. When they looked around, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Airbnb had built the same thing internally. That was the validation.
We sat down with Benn Stancil (Co-founder of Mode). Here are the takeaways 🧵:
If you've ever nuked a production database, wondered why data teams can't share code like frontend teams, or want to know why Max thinks AI will hit data roles harder than software roles, listen to this. Full episode: https://youtu.be/6dQntoiQBY8 #DataEngineering #AIEngineering
Max evangelized Airflow to over 50 companies before it gained real traction. One interaction at a time on GitHub plus being present in the community. Hear how he did it: https://youtube.com/shorts/O2J0HJyTkkk #OpenSource #CommunityBuilding
If you use Airflow or Superset in production, what's one feature you wish existed that would 10x your workflow? Drop your answer below. #DataEngineering #OpenSource
Hearing Max explain how he told Airbnb he would not work without building Airflow is a masterclass in knowing your leverage as an engineer. Watch: https://youtube.com/shorts/-n8335QlDRI #CareerAdvice #Airflow
Client Info
Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.07
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst