The Joe Reis Show

In this episode, I sit down with Kirill Bobrov, a Senior Data Engineer at Spotify and author of the popular blog Luminousmen. Kirill recently gained massive attention for his viral Substack repost of "Drunk Post: Things I've learned as a senior engineer".
We dive into the straightforward realities of the current tech industry, exploring whether the AI boom is a beneficial infrastructure-building phase or just another bubble. We also discuss how AI impacts day-to-day data engineering, why actual engineering thinking cannot be fully replaced by agents, and the evolving landscape of tech careers and job hopping.
Finally, we share our mutual struggles and triumphs in writing technical books, touching on Kirill's comprehensive book about concurrency.
Luminousmen: https://luminousmen.com/

Just a heads up on some new weekly content formats coming out.
Monday Mental Models - One durable concept each week, related to data engineering, architecture, AI/ML, modeling, etc.

Wednesday Builder’s Log (plus optional office hour listener questions) - Behind the scenes of what I’m working on, experiments, etc.

More random rants.

This is in addition to Freestyle Fridays/newsletter and podcast interviews with guests. Will be an audio podcast (maybe occasional video), and an accompanying Substack post. Posts will be either on my personal substack or practical data modeling.
Also, been stuck in the bat cave finishing the book and course (might be some good material for the Wednesday show?), so expect more drips on that very soon :)

I get asked by junior-level graduates and candidates in data engineering, analytics, and data science about what to do to succeed in today's challenging job market. With AI rapidly changing employer expectations, there's understandably a lot of anxiety today, particularly among juniors.

In this Freestyle Friday, I answer in terms of what I'd do if I was a junior candidate today - the necessary tech and personal skills, my top 5 traits in a candidate, and building one's network.
Obviously I can only speak from my perspective, but hopefully there's some helpful advice here.
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Maxime Beauchemin, the creator of Apache Airflow and Apache Superset, joins the show to discuss his transition from data engineering to the frontier of AI. Max shares the origin stories of his massive open-source projects, detailing how Airflow was born at Airbnb out of a need for better data orchestration. He also explains his shift toward user interfaces with Superset and the founding of his company, Preset.
We then shift to the future of software development. Max dives deep into his recent "Claude Code moment" and introduces Agor, his new command center for agentic workflows.
Discover how his team is using persistent AI agents to automate everything from deal desks and legal reviews to automated bug bashing and QA testing. Finally, the discussion explores the tech singularity, the concept of a "software utopia," and how awesome hobbies like mountain biking and e-foiling will fit into an automated world.
Agor: https://agor.live/

Finished a jog on the high plains near South Pass, Wyoming, where there's a lot of history. Standing near the old Oregon and Mormon trails, I look at the remnants of the 1800s gold rush to draw parallels to the current AI boom.