09: Building the Operating System for Work with Ivan Kanevski of Slapdash

10/07/20 • 43 min

On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds are joined by Slapdash co-founder Ivan Kanevski. Slapdash describes itself as the operating system for work. Slapdash emphasizes reducing the time people spend controlling their computer in relation to the time they spend expressing their intent.

Key topics discussed were:

Starting Slapdash and expanding on tools from working at Facebook (3:31)
Being client agnostic and working with the tools that people bring to the job (7:35)
Distinctions between mouse-centric and keyboard-centric users (12:58)
Slapdash’s approach to collecting data (16:08)
Building Slapdash to scale and using Postgres (19:45)
Using a graph model and a focus on efficiency (24:50)
Challenges of reducing latency (29:35)
Opening up Slapdash to be programmable (38:17)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Key topics discussed were:

Starting Slapdash and expanding on tools from working at Facebook (3:31)
Being client agnostic and working with the tools that people bring to the job (7:35)
Distinctions between mouse-centric and keyboard-centric users (12:58)
Slapdash’s approach to collecting data (16:08)
Building Slapdash to scale and using Postgres (19:45)
Using a graph model and a focus on efficiency (24:50)
Challenges of reducing latency (29:35)
Opening up Slapdash to be programmable (38:17)

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Previous Episode

08: When data alone is not enough - Reinventing book shopping at Bookshop.org with Mason Stewart

In this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds chat with Mason Stewart, the lead engineer at Bookshop.org. Bookshop is an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores. Their hope is to help strengthen the fragile ecosystem and margins around bookselling and keep local bookstores an integral part of our culture and communities.

Among other topics, today’s conversation talked about making what some might call boring decisions with the data stack that are better described as mature decisions and the intertwining of human interaction with data for problem solving and recommendations.

Background on Mason and Bookshop.org (3:28)
Technical challenges of keeping up with a rapidly expanding business (10:00)
Interacting with data from fulfillment partners (14:36)
Data schema for books and dealing with Elasticsearch (24:46)
Human intervention in recognizing problems and exceptions (31:38)
In-depth look at Bookshop’s data stack (37:06)
Using curated lists from bookstores instead of algorithmic recommendations (43:50)

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Next Episode

10: The Evolution of the BI Market with Huy Nguyen of Holistics

In this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds are joined by CTO and Co-Founder of Holistics, Huy Nguyen. Holistics takes an approach to business intelligence and data analytics that they call DataOps. They focus on data team productivity and company-wide access to insights.

Important points in the conversation included:

Introduction to Huy and Holistics (3:12)
Approaching BI with more than just visualization (8:59)
How friction between different roles within an organization is addressed by Holistics (15:20)
Holistics as a complementary tool (23:25)
Describing their own data stack (34:47)
History of BI and trends for the future (39:33)

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.