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. ----------------------- Sponsor: Fivetran With the rise of AI and agents, having centralized, trustworthy data...

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 answ...

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 p...

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 in...

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 tec...

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 com...

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.

In this episode, I sit down with Prukalpa Sankar, the founder of Atlan, to discuss the missing piece that makes artificial intelligence actually useful in the enterprise: context. We dive deep into building the "second brain" of a company, the reality of agent development, and how to transition a traditional business into an AI-native organization. If you're looking to understand why...

Juan Sequeda stops by after a massive month on the road to unpack the latest industry shifts, including takeaways from the Snowflake Summit. We dive into the real state of AI agents in the enterprise, separating the hype from the reality of adoption. We also explore the dangers of creating a "semantic swamp," (cousin of data swamps) the shifting landscape of vendor strategies with the ri...

In this Freestyle Friday episode, Ryan Dolly and I record straight from the historic Guardian Building in downtown Detroit to talk about life, tech, and data outside the San Francisco bubble. We had an amazing time connecting at the Data in the D town hall and exploring a city undergoing massive revitalization. Detroit was once the Silicon Valley of its time, peaking at nearly 1.9 million resident...

It's been a few months on the road, bouncing through San Francisco a bunch, across Asia and Europe, and a quick stop in Detroit. In this audio-only Freestyle Friday I unpack what I've been seeing out there. If I had to pick one word for the mood worldwide, it's uncertainty : energy and supply shocks rippling out of the Middle East, fuel and resource shortages, flights getting canceled...

If you're a consultant and you're not using AI agents yet, your competitors are. No surprise, but they're delivering faster, cheaper, and better than ever. Chris Tabb, founder of LEIT Data, joins me live at Confluent Current London 2026 to talk honestly about how AI agents are reshaping the consultancy model, from billing structures and team rollouts, to building internal tribal knowle...

Everyone in tech is telling you to go faster. Eric stepped away from his role to do the opposite. In this conversation, we get into why so many people feel like they're falling behind in AI, and why that feeling is mostly manufactured. Eric makes the case that we're miscalibrated: assuming what's true for the 0.1% (the SF AI inner circle) is true for the 10%, when by definition almost...

In this episode, Tristan Handy and I sit down to unpack a massive shift coming to the data industry: over the next 12 months, the primary consumers of data won't be humans. They will be AI agents. We dive deep into what this means for data infrastructure, compute costs, and the tools we use every day. We also talk about processing high-volume agent queries, building "context stores",...

NOTE - Sorry for the edits in this video. I used Descript to edit out the umms and uhhs, and it was a bit too aggressive. Will make it less jarring in future videos. Thanks. Freestyle Friday, May 15, 2026 Walking around Salt Lake City and unpacking the April 2026 data modeling survey results (334 respondents). Across three surveys now: January's State of Data Engineering (1,100), March's A...

Are AI agents silently draining your cloud data budget? With the rise of consumption-based pricing and autonomous AI queries, data teams are facing a perfect storm of skyrocketing costs and operational chaos. In this episode, I sit down with Sanjay Agrawal, CEO and Co-founder of Revefi, to discuss the intersection of data engineering, cloud warehouse optimization, and FinOps in the age of AI.We ch...

Zach Wilson and I happen to be in Stockholm, Sweden, this evening. In this Freestyle Friday chat, we talk about what it takes to be a data engineer in 2026 and much more.

Josh Wills has spent 25 years writing data pipelines, with a career spanning Cloudera, as Director of Data Engineering at Slack, on the dbt DuckDB adapter, and now training foundation models at Datology AI. He uses coding agents every day. And he keeps running into the same wall: the agents jump to conclusions, fix the wrong thing, and ship pipelines no one understands. In this conversation, we un...

Stop Tokenmaxxing and step off the AI hamster wheel. Welcome to another Freestyle Friday! What's the overwhelming vibe in the AI zeitgeist? "If you aren't maxing out AI every second, you're going to be left behind." Therefore, Tokenmaxxing is the way, right? I strongly disagree. We're burning ourselves out with fake productivity and a graveyard of abandoned AI-generated projects. In this episode,...

Shinji Kim, founder of SelectStar (acquired by Snowflake in December), joins the show to discuss the deal, the integration into Snowflake's Horizon catalog, and where data cataloging is actually headed. We get into the weeds on a claim Shinji makes early: in a few years, we may stop calling these things "data catalogs" at all. The category is evolving into an AI context layer, a livi...

AI has completely inverted how we build and scale software, which begs the question: What exactly is a moat anymore? In this Freestyle Friday, recovering from jet lag and hiking through the beautiful hills of Salt Lake City, I’m breaking down a recent conversation with a VC friend about defensibility in the era of coding agents. I also look at this through Charlie Munger’s lens of "inversion&...

Are vendors trying to lock down your data? In this episode, George Fraser breaks down why the "modern data stack" has evolved into "open data infrastructure". We discuss why data gravity is the most overrated concept in data management, how egress charges are often misunderstood due to poorly designed pipelines, and why companies must insist on having a true replica of their ow...

Walking through Tokyo and breaking down the reality of the AI revolution. In this Freestyle Friday from Shibuya Crossing, I look past the current AI hype cycle to examine the real bottlenecks of AI adoption. Is the current AI boom just a repeat of the dot.com bubble? Why is simply buying Copilot subscriptions for your team failing to move the needle? Drawing parallels to the 40-year adoption curve...

In this episode, I sit down with Bob Seiner, a true pioneer who has been working in data governance since before it was even called governance. We dive into why he calls BS on the trendy term "data enablement" and how his trademarked approach, Non-Invasive Data Governance, formalizes what organizations are already doing without beating employees over the head. We also unpack his latest concept, Th...

Do fundamentals still matter, or are we all just "vibe engineering" our architectures now? Coming to you live and sweating from the hillsides of Phuket, Thailand, this week's Freestyle Friday dives into the tension between chasing the newest tech and mastering first principles. After a recent LinkedIn debate suggesting teams "don't have time" for fundamentals anymore, I...