The Joe Reis Show

In this Freestyle Friday episode, I break down results from the June 2026 Pulse Survey on organizational dysfunction among data engineers. I also dig into why data product ownership (or lack thereof) is one of the fundamental issues standing between companies and success with data and AI.
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Sponsor: Fivetran
With the rise of AI and agents, having centralized, trustworthy data is the absolute foundation for building tools and training models. Fivetran automates your data pipelines, removing the need to build fragile connectors so your data arrives clean and reliable. By handling the messy infrastructure behind the scenes, Fivetran allows your team to focus on building the future. Visit fivetran.com to learn more.
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Sponsor: Revefi
Save serious money on your cloud costs with Revefi’s new autonomous AI DBA, a tool built to handle the gritty reality of cloud data management so you can stop babysitting your infrastructure. Start saving money today at ⁠revefi.com/ai-dba

I get a lot of questions about how I'm using AI for my writing. In this podcast, I walk through how I use AI for idea generation, writing review, editing, drafting, manuscripts, and much more.
Also, this is a new Wednesday podcast where I discuss building things and take listener questions. If you have a question, please drop them in the comments and if I like the question, I'll do my best to answer it.
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Mixed Model Arts will be out soon. If you want to get a good deal on the e-book and on-demandcourse, please go to Practical Data Modeling.: https://practicaldatamodeling.substack.com/

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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Sponsor: Revefi
Save serious money on your cloud costs with Revefi’s new autonomous AI DBA, a tool built to handle the gritty reality of cloud data management so you can stop babysitting your infrastructure.
With a five-minute, zero-touch setup, it deploys 18 specialized agents across your data estate to automatically manage FinOps, performance tuning, and data quality. If you want to cut your cloud costs by 30% to 70% and get back to actual data architecture, check out what they are building at revefi.com/ai-dba