iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by David Jayatillake

Samuel Wong @samuelwong.bsky.social · 28/09/2025

How big should your data team be? Data teams are often oversized. A company of 200 people rarely needs 15+ data staff, usually 5% of org size is enough dataactionmentor.com/knowledge-ba...

dataactionmentor.com

How big should your data team be?

Founders and CEOs are wondering if their data function is bloated and if they should replace everyone with AI agents. Data Leaders are scrambling to defend why they need a 15-people data team in a 200...

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

The amount you love someone is proportional to how often you Ghiblify their pictures.

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

This week I look at agents. I think this is a new way to build where we don’t intentionally build code-based software. open.substack.com/pub/davidsj/...

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 20/06/2025

I don't usually share photos of my family on social media for good reason, but I'm happy to share these ones!

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

This post encapsulates how I feel about the current state of LLMs and doomers etc. Really great read: fly.io/blog/youre-a...

fly.io

My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts

My smartest friends have bananas arguments about LLM coding.

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

So when I've attended Snowflake summit before, I've usually written a blog post talking about the new features released, etc. Is someone going to do that this year, given I didn't go? 😊 #datasky #databs

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

Anil Dash @anildash.com · 06/06/2025

It is possible to build machine learning systems which punch up instead of punching down.

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

rmoff 🏃‍♂️🫖🥓 @rmoff.net · 05/06/2025

Got a cool story about something in the data engineering space? You should 💯 submit it as a talk to Current 2025 in New Orleans 😁 Do it! Now! CfP is open until 15th June. sessionize.com/current-2025... (Pro-tip: you only need an abstract at this point; writing the talk can be later 😅) #dataBS

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

Mark Rittman @markrittman.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

At the London Data Practitioners Meetup with @pedramnavid.com @jayatillake.bsky.social @rittmananalytics.bsky.social and the London Dagster community

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

Has anyone tried Llama 4 Maverick yet? How big a machine does it need to run locally? @simonwillison.net

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

Looks like Nintendo became the best at console FPS.

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Once again, we've devised a derogatory name for something many of us are doing: "Vibe coding". Just like "Citizen Data Scientist", "Excel Data Analyst", and many other terms made to belittle by the supposed true artisans that came before. open.substack.com/pub/davidsj/...

open.substack.com

Vibe coder

Free like a puppy

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

arynndoesdata @arynn.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

I enabled the Cube AI API Slack App today, and I found a little treat 👀 Shout-out @mjirv.bsky.social and @jayatillake.bsky.social! If you're curious how easy this is to set up, check out: cube.dev/blog/make-yo...

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about @pola.rs Cloud, and as coincidence would have it, DeepSeek then releases smallpond - a way to use @duckdb.org scaled out. It's pretty cool that an org has managed to build this, but is it the right way? davidsj.substack.com/p/many-ducks...

davidsj.substack.com

Many ducks, a big pond

Splitting the query

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

🗣️ It was a real honour to speak at the very first Forward Data Conference in Paris last November, not to mention being introduced with a special piano verse just for me! 🎹 www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNQW...

youtube.com

AI on Data - snake oil or actually useful?

YouTube video by ForwardDataConf

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

🏭 @tobikodata.com released a great new feature for SQLMesh last week called blueprinting. This is a feature that the dbt Labs community has been asking for for ages, and I’ve been wanting it too! open.substack.com/pub/davidsj/...

open.substack.com

Model Generation

A big feature release by SQLMesh

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

I've been interacting with r/dataengineering a bit recently, and I'm impressed by the size and engagement with the community there, but... Folks on #databs / #datasky seem much less likely to just mouth off without thinking or reading! I think I much prefer what we have here on BlueSky.

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

arynndoesdata @arynn.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Yep! And the new(ish) rust-based data engine also brought the ability to do multi-stage calculations. Bonus - "Tesseract" is an amazing name for a Cube engine 😀 cube.dev/blog/introdu...

cube.dev

Introducing Next-Generation Data Modeling Engine - Cube Blog

Previewing multi-stage calculations and performance leaps in the SQL Planner

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

pola.rs/posts/polars... This so reminds me of @motherduck.com and @duckdb.org, I guess the open source Polars is as good as it can be on one machine, and Polars Cloud is as good as it can be on many.

pola.rs

Polars Cloud; the distributed Cloud Architecture to run Polars anywhere

DataFrames for the new era

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

Emily Moin @emilymoin.com · 14/02/2025

Cancer incidence rises when people live longer and have access to preventive care to diagnose it in time to treat it, and effective treatment increases cancer prevalence because we count the people who are still alive – this is a good thing, and I'm so fucking tired.

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

🚀 Exciting times in the data transformation space! Recently, dbt Labs acquired SDF Labs, while @tobikodata.com acquired Quary (YC W24)—both promising Rust-based frameworks. So is SDF better than SQLMesh? No. open.substack.com/pub/davidsj/...

open.substack.com

SDF

Is it better than SQLMesh?

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

arynndoesdata @arynn.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

One question that comes up for me on calls with companies- why can't I just build a semantic layer in my data platform? My brilliant coworker Morgan wrote a great post on why @cubedev.bsky.social is more beneficial as a semantic layer. Enjoy! cube.dev/blog/why-cub...

cube.dev

Why Cube Store is the Best Choice for Storing Pre-Aggregated Data - Cube Blog

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

Announcing a new Substack! Focused on the theme of applying AI to analytics. I'm collaborating with Artyom Keydunov and Brian Bickell on this, and we'll bring you interesting, trending articles and news on our theme. aiforanalytics.substack.com/p/ai-for-ana...

aiforanalytics.substack.com

AI for Analytics #1

We are launching a newsletter and a podcast on how AI is transforming the data industry!

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

Simon Späti 🏔️ @ssp.sh · 07/02/2025

Is there anything specific you want to know about OLAP cubes, especially newer open-source systems (e.g., ClickHouse, Druid, Starrocks, Pinot, Kylin, Doris, Cube, and more)? Which one is your favorite and why?

Git Stars comparison of popular open-source OLAP systems.

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

Nico Ritschel @nicoritschel.com · 05/02/2025

DuckDB out here making me avoid other SQL dialects

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

__Alex Monahan__ @a13x.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

DuckDB 1.2 brings serious performance to real-world queries! Selective joins, IN lists, Top N, partitioned parquet reads, and more get much faster! Performance is also incrementally improved ~across the board. Plus, the CSV reader improves (latin-1 for Windows folks!), SQL is friendlier, and more!

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

@anthropic.com's Dario Amodei wrote a really thoughtful piece on the @deepseek.bsky.social situation and how it relates to overall macro end games with AI: darioamodei.com/on-deepseek-...

darioamodei.com

Dario Amodei — On DeepSeek and Export Controls

On DeepSeek and Export Controls

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

Felix M. Simon @felixsimon.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

It's weird how people see these two as mutually exclusive.

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 29/01/2025

OpenAI right now

Scene from The Princess Bride where Vizzinni says "You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen"

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

I didn't realise there was another way... I either discover code or copy-paste and edit an existing solution... plus now AI. jimmyhmiller.github.io/discovery-co...

jimmyhmiller.github.io

Discovery Coding

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

Nico Ritschel @nicoritschel.com · 28/01/2025

If you're considering SQLMesh, @jayatillake.bsky.social has a great blog series from the end of last year that does in depth comparisons with DBT

davidsj.substack.com

sqlmesh init -t dbt

Backwards Compatibility

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

Just had my first ever Wendy’s… not bad.

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 25/01/2025

Any company whose mission is to “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity” would be ecstatic about a capable open source model like Deepseek released. Any company which has a mission of making money off closed-source models would be devastated tho.

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

Adrian Brudaru @datateam.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐝𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐫𝐮𝐧 𝐝𝐥𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐀𝐖𝐒 𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐛𝐝𝐚? (tldr - 100x cheaper than Saas) Here are code templates: Github: github.com/codingcyclis... Blog: dlthub.com/blog/dlt-aws... We use GCP ourselves: dlthub.com/blog/dlt-seg... #databs

github.com

GitHub - codingcyclist/dlt-aws-lambda: Boilerplates for running DLT on AWS Lambda to create well-structured datasets from unstructured JSON without breaking a sweat

Boilerplates for running DLT on AWS Lambda to create well-structured datasets from unstructured JSON without breaking a sweat - codingcyclist/dlt-aws-lambda

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 20/01/2025

DeepSeek released a whole family of inference-scaling / "reasoning" models today, including distilled variants based on Llama and Qwen Here are my notes on the new models, plus how I ran DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B on my Mac using Ollama and LLM simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/20/...

simonwillison.net

DeepSeek-R1 and exploring DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B

DeepSeek are the Chinese AI lab who dropped the best currently available open weights LLM on Christmas day, DeepSeek v3. That model was trained in part using their unreleased R1 …

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

arynndoesdata @arynn.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

I really like working at Cube. Selling doesn't feel like selling when I get to talk about a tool I genuinely believe in. I can't believe I've been here less than 6 months. It feels both way longer and way shorter at the same time.

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David Jayatillake @jayatillake.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

Are the SDF founders/team on here?

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Reposted by David Jayatillake

Tristan Handy @jthandy.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

Today, we’re announcing that dbt Labs has acquired SDF Labs. This a monumental day for dbt Labs and the entire dbt Community Thread on what that means 🧵 www.getdbt.com/blog/dbt-lab...