MDS Newsletter #46

Hello MDS Community👋

Looks like Hex is giving tough competition to Tecton, Hopsworks, and Feast to be on top of Modern Data Stack👀

Bring it on data nerds!!!

Go and upvote your favorite data tool here

Featured tools of the week

Hex is a Modern Data Workspace. It makes it easy to connect to data, analyze it in collaborative SQL and Python-powered notebooks, and share work as interactive data apps and stories. Hex brings together collaborative notebooks, beautiful data apps, and enterprise-grade security.

Hex has raised a total of $73.5M in funding over 4 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Mar 22, 2022 from a Series B round.
Snowplow is a behavioral data platform, built to empower data teams and solve today's most complex data challenges. It helps you create the data you need to power your breakthrough, and unlock AI and advanced analytics right from your own data warehouse, lake, or lakehouse.

Snowplow Analytics has raised a total of $55.2M in funding over 3 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jun 30, 2022 from a Series B round.

Featured data stack of the week

Loft is reinventing the process of buying and selling real estate in Brazil by leveraging technology and data to transform painful and bureaucratic processes into simple and delightful experiences. At Loft, you can sell your apartment instantly for a fair price or find your next perfect home ready for move-in.

Here's how they have organized their data stack.

If you want us to feature your data stack, submit it here.

Good reads and resources

Data Orchestration Trends: The Shift From Data Pipelines to Data Products: When discussing complex open-source cloud environments, it's crucial to integrate and orchestrate various tools from the Modern Data Stack. The question is not anymore how we can transform data but how we get an overview of all data crunched and stored. In this article, Simon Spati discussed the importance of focusing on data products instead of data pipelines and why it is better to write declarative code. He also covered reasons for using abstractions in the complex big open-source data world and how to make pipelines more data-aware to align with the mission of the data mesh.
BI Done Differently - Our Alerting System: Learn how the BI team at Riskified developed an alerting system using Python and Airflow. Orit Mansur wrote about the challenges the Riskified BI team faced including making business users rely on the data, too many dashboards, missing important alerts, and fixing issues retroactively. As a result, they created a solution that not only served their pain points but is useful for diverse use cases like opening a SalesForce case, creating a Google sheet, and triggering a manual charge.
Data Mesh — A Data Movement and Processing Platform @ Netflix: Real-time processing technologies is one of the key factors that enable Netflix to maintain its leading position in the competition of entertaining users. Now the data team at Netflix has decided to create Data Mesh as their next-generation data pipeline solution. Data Mesh is a complex yet powerful system. Netflix believes that as it gains its maturity, it will be instrumental in Netflix’s future success. Read this article to know what high-priority tasks are on the Data Mesh roadmap of Netflix.

Community speaks

This week's question:

You can answer it here

Last week's question:

I would probably start by understanding what matters from the management's point of view. This will make it much easier to link why you have chosen your particular data architecture to their interests. Often what comes up are financial considerations and what the Board of Directors wants, but exploring further will get you into some interesting and valuable conversations about the customer and the business as a system. Then the vision can become very interesting for management as you connect the data architecture ideas to these more detailed concepts (understanding what matters to customers will not only prevent churn but also improve the experience, translating into repeat business and referrals--and we're doing this to help you measure these things more accurately).
- Jason Frank

Upcoming data events and summits

'Disney Data and Analytics Conference' is being organised from August 15-17, 2022 in Disney's Coronado spring resort, Orlando, FL.

The Disney Data & Analytics Conference (DDAC) has a rich history of delivering exceptional content focused on data and analytics to business professionals of all backgrounds. From engaging breakout sessions to interactive networking opportunities, we’re confident you’ll see examples of how data-based, analytical decisions work in all areas of business.

More information on the event here.

Data startup funding news

Rill Data raised $12 million in a seed funding round!

Rill Data makes it easy to create and consume metrics by combining a SQL-based data modeler, real-time database, and metrics dashboard into a single product—a simple alternative to complex BI stacks. It was co-founded by Michael E. Driscoll and Nishant Bangarwa.

Read the full story here.

MDS Jobs

Aiven is hiring a ‘Director of Analytics'
Location- Remote
Data Stack- Stitch, Kafka, Airflow, dbt, Bigquery
Apply here
Stytch is hiring a ‘Senior Data Engineer’
Location- Remote, US
Data Stack- Snowflake, dbt, Fivetran, Mode
Apply here
Postscript is hiring an ‘Analytics Engineer’
Location- US
Data Stack- Fivetran, Snowflake, dbt, Looker
Apply here

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If you have any suggestions, want us to feature an article, or list a data engineering job, hit us up! We would love to include it in our next edition😎

About Moderndatastack.xyz‌‌ - We're building a platform to bring together people in the data community to learn everything about building and operating a Modern Data Stack. It's pretty cool - do check it out :)