Jeremiah Lowin, founder and CEO of Prefect, explains why Prefect prioritizes reducing time to error during production outages over routine workflow automation.
“If you imagine saving someone one hour orchestrating something, just getting that code to run versus saving a team one hour in a production crisis incident, the leverage of that hour, it's the same hour, but the leverage, the impact, the emotional burden, the fact that revenue's at risk versus, you know, just the fact that you've got stuff to go is so wildly different.”
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More from Jeremiah Lowin
Opinion
Lowin: Managed hosting for open-source tools is a bad business model
“I think that that is a bad business model. And I sort of, I'm on the record of that. And for a very simple reason, which is that A company that is solving a problem needs to find the correct way to express its knowledge and its solution to that problem.”
Jeremiah LowinDec 11, 2020▶ 41:52Fireside Chat: Jeremiah Lowin (Prefect), Tristan Handy (dbt) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Lowin: Prefect's functionality is a superset of Apache Airflow's
“Now it happens that our functionality is a superset of Airflow's functionality.”
Jeremiah LowinDec 11, 2020▶ 30:03Fireside Chat: Jeremiah Lowin (Prefect), Tristan Handy (dbt) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Insight
Jeremiah Lowin: Every data system eventually requires defining a schema
“You're going to have a schema. It's just a question of whether you define it upfront or you figure it out later.”
Jeremiah LowinDec 11, 2020▶ 13:21Fireside Chat: Jeremiah Lowin (Prefect), Tristan Handy (dbt) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Disclosure
Lowin: Prefect acts as insurance, delivering value when data pipelines break
“That's why we frequently describe our product as an insurance product is because we deliver value mainly when things go wrong. And this will sound crazy maybe to say, but if everything goes the way one of our users expected it to go, they really don't Need our…”
Jeremiah LowinDec 11, 2020▶ 28:21Fireside Chat: Jeremiah Lowin (Prefect), Tristan Handy (dbt) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Insight
Lowin: Negative engineering is defensive work ensuring code actually runs
“And so we've named this problem, the negative engineering problem, because it's not about what you're trying to achieve. It's about all the defensive work you have to do to make sure that it actually took place, in fact, took place.”
Jeremiah LowinDec 11, 2020▶ 28:50Fireside Chat: Jeremiah Lowin (Prefect), Tristan Handy (dbt) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
What-if
Lowin would have built Prefect within Apache Airflow if possible
“And if I were able to do the things that Prefect does in airflow, I would have.”
Jeremiah LowinDec 11, 2020▶ 29:43Fireside Chat: Jeremiah Lowin (Prefect), Tristan Handy (dbt) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
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