WTF is happening in data engineering?

While you were sleeping, both Anthropic and OpenAI had major announcements, countless new open source models got released, and Airflow Dags now have loops (soon)!

Keeping up is a full-time job, and it’s hard to filter through the noise and buzzwords to figure out what is actually worth your time, especially when you’re caught between the frontier of tech and legacy data swamps.

Tamara and Volker are going through the same thing. They’ve been asking questions like: Is DuckDB on an iPhone really faster than your Databricks cluster? Is everything small data these days? Is 3NF dead, or is one big table the answer? And when stakeholders say “we need realtime data,” what do they actually mean? Also, who is Jev?

There’s no fixed agenda, because anything on our list could be outdated within a week. But here’s what to expect:

• A casual conversation between two data engineers trying to decipher the current trends
• Honest takes on where the role is headed (it’s not all bad!)
• Resources and code to take home, which we would recommend over reading the entire internet