The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 12 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
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 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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
Lowin: Saving time during outages offers higher leverage than routine orchestration
“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 …”
Lowin: Very few open-source projects turn into successful commercial businesses
“The number of successful companies that have actually iterated on this open source, The number is very, very, very small, and it's especially small relative to the denominator, which is much larger because the cost of entering the market is so low.”
Lowin: GraphQL is fabulous for exploratory work and well-defined queries
“What we've found is that it's fabulous for exploratory work. Or ironically well defined queries, which is sort of the opposite of the purpose of GraphQL.”
Lowin: Modern tools let analysts query data warehouses directly over static CSVs
“If we think back to BI tools, say five, certainly 10 years ago, you would sort of beg for a CSV and God help you if the data, if the insight you weren't, the insight you were looking for was not in that CSV, you were sort of screwed. But now thanks to, you kno…”
Lowin: Mapping is Prefect's most popular feature
“It's by far the most popular feature of Prefect. And we can see that in our data. And that's because it solves a real problem that I experienced with data science, which I have a bunch of things I need to work with, but I don't know about it until Until runtim…”