The Wonder-Driven Builder — with Paige Bailey

The Wonder-Driven Builder — with Paige Bailey

Paige Bailey is a developer relations engineering lead at Google DeepMind. She's a geophysicist-turned-AI-engineer who was once told by her professors that building open-source libraries was a waste of time. We talk about her path from planetary science to TensorFlow, why statisticians have a hidden edge in the age of AI, and what it means to be a curious generalist when the cost of building software is approaching zero. Bonus: installing solar-powered silent-film birdhouses as street art in San Francisco. What's inside * From planetary science to TensorFlow, before it was GPU-capable * Geophysicists as early GPU adopters * The professors who said open-source wasn’t “real science” * Building silent-film birdhouses as San Francisco street art * Hiding Gemini API tests inside whimsical side projects * The right-tool-for-the-job case for mixing AI models * Why “taste” is the skill that matters when code costs nothing

Widgets Are Lego Bricks (and Other Things People Are Sleeping On) — with Vincent Warmerdam

Vincent Warmerdam has been the first full-time hire at a startup, a spacey punster who accidentally got himself a job, a bartender at an Amsterdam comedy theater, and a Dutch bike tour guide — and he'll tell you all of it was career development. Now doing DevRel at Marimo, Vincent makes the case for reactive notebooks, Lego-brick widgets, and why "number go up" is not a data science strategy. Also: chickens die. The model doesn't know. This matters more than you think. What's inside * How a spacey pun accidentally launched Vincent's career * Why Marimo's constraints make it better for LLMs, not just humans * The gorilla hiding in your dataset — and why the model missed it * Vibe coding vs. notebooks: three cells at a time as a discipline * Widgets as Lego bricks: reusable, composable, criminally underused * Cognitive debt, confirmation bias, and sycophantic data science * Why natural intelligence is still, actually, a pretty good idea

Everything's a Fad (Including This Podcast) — with Benn Stancil

Benn Stancil built Mode Analytics, spent a decade in the data trenches, and now writes some of the sharpest, funniest essays in the data world. On The Test Set, he talks about the cultural shift from Nate Silver to Rick Rubin why AI might kill the analytics dashboard, and what happens when a thousand startups all build the same thing. Plus: boy bands as a model for collaboration, and why the best creative work starts with cheating. What's inside:  * Why the modern data stack was basically big data 2.0 * The cultural flip from Nate Silver to Rick Rubin * Gas Town, tar pits, and the AI startup zero-sum game * Software is becoming content, and that changes things * Benn's creative process: Lorde lyrics, Codenames, and cheating * The boy band as a model for small-team collaboration * BI is (mostly) dead, and vibes might replace SQL

Deeply Unsexy: SQL's Redemption Arc — with Tristan Handy

dbt Labs CEO Tristan Handy drops into The Test Set to map the fault lines between the data science world and the enterprise data world — and explain why analytics engineers are basically pissed-off data analysts who decided to organize the bookshelf. We get into SQL's glow-up, the community magic of dbt Slack, what AI agents mean for data warehouses, and why everyone's building iOS apps with Claude now. What's inside: * What analytics engineers *actually* do * SQL's journey from deeply unsexy to indispensable * How dbt turned source control into a source of truth * Building a tech community without the RTFM energy * AI agents on your data lake: permissions get personal * Will LLMs kill the open-source package ecosystem? * Edible gardening, welding dreams, and digital dysphoria

Your VP Is Doing a Rogue Analysis in Cursor Right Now — with Nell Thomas

Nell Thomas has spent two decades in data — from equity research to the DNC to Facebook to leading a 400-person data org at Shopify. She walks Michael and Wes through the modern data stack role by role, gets honest about what AI is and isn't changing about data work, and admits the semantic layer has been her greatest leadership failure. Plus: Sneakers gets the respect it deserves. Episode Notes What does it actually look like to run data infrastructure for millions of merchants while the entire industry reinvents itself in real time? Nell Thomas (VP of Data, Shopify) talks vibe-coded dashboards, political campaign data scarcity, blameless postmortems, and why no one should be locking in on an AI strategy just yet. Recorded live in Times Square. What’s Inside * Mapping the modern data stack, role by role * Why data quality is still the #1 problem * What "good scrutiny" looks like on a data team * Vibe coded dashboards and the trust problem * Shopify's MCP for their data warehouse * The throwaway tech problem in political campaigns * Why the semantic layer is so damn hard * Sneakers!