The Joe Reis Show

In this episode, I sit down with Prashant Sridharan, a 30-year veteran of developer marketing who has shaped go-to-market strategies for tech giants like Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, AWS, Facebook, and Twitter, and currently runs product marketing at Supabase. We dive deep into the origins of DevRel and how marketing to developers has evolved in an increasingly noisy, AI-saturated landscape.Topics covered:- Transitioning from massive tech companies to the fast-paced startup world - How to genuinely measure the success of Developer Relations without ruining communities - Using AI tools like Claude to accelerate mechanical marketing tasks while preserving authentic storytelling - The shift from traditional SEO to GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) for developer tools - The thrill of live, unscripted coding demos and stories from sharing the stage with Steve Ballmer - Prashant's upcoming fiction novel, The Midnight Coders Children, and the craft of writing Find more from Prashant at StrategicNerds.com and check out his non-fiction book, Picks and Shovels: https://amzn.to/4cJ2TRO

For 40+ years, the data industry has tried to teach good practices and get adoption, often in the same way. And for 40+ years, that approach keeps failing over and over. Based on the recent Practical Data Community Survey, practitioners face challenges like time pressures, lack of direction, and lack of clear ownership. Do we need to try something else as an industry? Or do we continue to be the poster child for the definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over, yet expecting different results? I hope not.

Why are we still using row-based protocols like ODBC and JDBC in a column-oriented world? In this episode, I sit down with Ian Cook, co-founder of Columnar and a long-time Apache Arrow contributor, to discuss the critical infrastructure changes needed to speed up modern analytics and AI.
We dive deep into the technical bottlenecks of legacy standards - specifically the "serialization tax" of converting columns to rows and back again - and how ADBC (Arrow Database Connectivity) solves this by keeping data columnar from end-to-end. Ian also shares his insights on the intersection of tabular data and LLMs, why AI agents need better access to OLAP systems, and the tension between vibe coding speed and the stability required for critical open-source infrastructure.

The 2026 Practical Data Community State of Data Engineering dropped this week. It's full of some obvious and very counterintuitive information about the state of data engineers around the globe, in all sizes and types of organizations. Check it out!
Also, I talk about the book writing process, where I messed up on this latest book, it's progress toward publication, and more.

Survey: https://joereis.github.io/practical_data_data_eng_survey

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I sat down with Paul Dudley (CEO) and Ricky Thomas (CTO) from StreamKap to catch up on where the world of streaming data is heading—and things have changed fast since we last spoke.

We dive into the concept of "vibe coding" and how AI is radically accelerating how we build software (I even share a story about building a data analysis tool in an hour). But the real meat of this conversation is about the intersection of streaming data and AI agents. Everyone is building agents, but without real-time context, they’re flying blind. We discuss why streaming is a missing link for agentic workflows, the shift from dashboards to automated decision-making, and why SaaS companies are racing to build walled gardens around their data.

We also get into the nitty-gritty of the UK vs. US tech markets, the resurgence of PR in the AI era, and StreamKap’s upcoming move into the Snowflake native app ecosystem.

Streamkap: https://streamkap.com/