MDS Newsletter #26

Hey all 👋

This week's edition has a fun surprise from Firebolt, amazing answers from the data community on our community speaks section, some great resources for you to read, funding news, data event updates, and more!

If you find this newsletter to be helpful, share it with your friends & colleagues in the data space! Help us make this newsletter reach every data nerd there is😀

Let's dive into this week's edition!

THE BIG DATA GAME🎮🔥

Looking for a quick break from work? Here's a sigh of relief for you by Firebolt - THE BIG DATA GAME: where an 8-bit data engineer is out on a mission to get data. On the way, this engineer gets some hurdles that might sound familiar to you, like data swamp, broken data pipelines, and my personal favorite, data tsunami!

Take a few minutes out of your busy schedule to play this before you go back to play with data again! (which I know can get boring😛) Give it a try. I enjoyed it!

Community Speaks

This week's question- 'Data team's mission statement'- how important is it?

You can send answers by replying to the email or writing to us at letters@moderndatastack.xyz

Last week's question-: According to you, what are companies losing if they do not invest in modern data stack?

By not investing in the modern data stack you are losing out on the opportunity to deliver insights to decision makers faster and cheaper. The amount and type of data that companies have today looks nothing like the data that companies had 15-30 years ago when many of the traditional databases, BI tools, and ETL tools were created. And many of those have been slow to adapt to that change and thus aren't equipped to handle today's data in an efficient manner.
Kelly Burdine, Director of Data Science and Analytics at Wellthy

If you're not investing in the modern data stack, you're missing out on...

1. Ability to empower your team (within and external to the data org) with data and insights
2. Data talent- churn for data analysts and engineers is higher than ever. Archaic stacks contribute to this
   Team, Secoda

Featured tools of the week

• Calixa is the platform for Product-Led Sales. It gives GTM teams the product insights they need to find, close, and grow customers in a sea of self-serve signups.
  
  Category: PLG CRM
  
  Calixa has raised a total of $16.3M in funding over 2 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Nov 9 2021 from a Series A round.
• Prefect is a new workflow management system, designed for modern infrastructure and powered by the open-source Prefect Core workflow engine.
  
  Category: Workflow Orchestration
  
  Prefect has raised a total of $57.6M in funding over 4 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jun 10 2021 from a Series B round.

Good reads and resources

• How Should We Be Thinking about Data Lineage?: Data lineage is one of the most discussed topics in the data community currently and for a valid reason. With ever-increasing data volume & evolution of lineage tools, data-driven organizations are high on lineage to enable every team member across the organization to be able to fully understand & trust data pipelines and to make faster data-driven decisions. Though it has a lot of promise, data lineage is a difficult concept to fully understand and even more difficult to implement. In this article, Jon Loyens has discussed in detail what is data lineage and 3 steps to implement it successfully and win.
• How The Modern Data Stack Is Going Real-Time: Organizations are fed up with traditional data architecture as it is slow & out of sync with the current business processes & their realities, which leads to delays in getting answers to crucial BI questions and at the end in taking the right decisions. The current business environment needs real-time feeds on what’s happening with the business through data. The real-time nature of these use cases has led to an update in the underlying data infrastructure that supports them. In this article, Nnamdi Iregbulem has talked about how the Modern Data Stack is going real-time and shared the case studies of Netflix & Uber to educate readers on real-time data infrastructure at scale.
• Executing a Data Strategy with OKRs: Every organization that is trying to extract the best possible value out of their business data is trying to ace their data strategy. With the right approach, it's possible to create a winning data strategy in theory but to implement it successfully to yield desired results is an entirely different challenge. In this article, Chris Brown has talked about how you can create a framework to cross the tricky path of bringing a comprehensive data strategy to reality by building a connection between data strategy & OKRs. He also discussed different elements of a comprehensive data strategy and how you can express the data strategy through OKRs.
• The Rise of the Data Reliability Engineer: With each day, the need to use data to make decisions is increasing irrespective of the different business industries. Yet the solutions that are being used to utilize this data to facilitate the decision-making process are getting complex due to several reasons. The need to run complex data pipelines to complete the journey of data to the dashboard to decision with minimum error rate in such a modern environment has led to the rise of a new role in the data space - “Data Reliability Engineer”. In this article, Alvin Lee has discussed in detail the role of DRE, specifically, what it is, what the role involves, and how DRE relates to SRE and DevOps. He also shared some great points on how you can decide if its time for your organization to invest in a Data Reliability Engineer or not!
• Data Visualization: 5 Most Important Things to Know: For those working in business intelligence data visualization is an important skill. And being good at it can really make you stand out in your job. Here’s a great article by Kerem Kargın on 5 important things that you must know to level up your data visualization game.

Upcoming Data Events and Summits

• Fivetran is organizing a fireside chat "The cloud-optimized Modern Data Stack: A Fireside Panel with Data and AI Groundbreakers" on March 24th, 2022.
  
  At this event, you will learn about
  -How a cloud-first modern data stack (MDS) leverages best in breed platforms to produce a solution stack.
  - What separates MDS from a legacy stack? How do security and performance weigh in?
  
  Registration link

Call for Speakers

• The 8th edition of Data Platform Virtual Summit 2022 is going to be held on September 19-23.
  
  Click on the link to know how to become a speaker at this event.

Data Startup funding news

• Scribble data has raised $2.2 million in seed funding.
  
  This round of funding was led by early-stage venture BlumVentures with participation from Log X Ventures, Sprout Venture Partners, Vivek Gour, and Ganesh Rao.
  
  Read the full story here.
• Hex raised $52M in Series B round of funding.
  
  This round of funding was led by a16z alongside existing investors Redpoint Venture and Amplify Partners and new investors Snowflake and Databricks.
  
  Read the story here.

MDS Jobs

• Loop is hiring a 'Senior Analytics Engineer'
  Location- Remote, U.S.
  Data Stack- dbt, Redshift, Bigquery, Docker, Looker, Stitch
  Apply here
• GiveDirectly is hiring a 'Senior Data Architect'
  Location- Remote, New York
  Check out GiveDirectly's data stack here
  Apply here
• Brooklyndata is hiring Data Engineers across all the levels
  Location- Remote
  Data Stack- Snowflake, dbt labs, Fivetran, Looker, Heap, Mixpanel
  Apply here
• Landbay is hiring a 'Data Engineer'
  Location- London(Hybrid)
  Data Stack- Hevo, Snowflake, dbt, Prefect, AWS
  Apply here
• Noodle is hiring a 'Data Analytics Engineer'
  Location- Remote, New York
  Data Stack- dbt, Looker, AWS Athena
  Apply here

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