#290 Applying Platform Engineering Best Practices to Your Mesh Data Platform - Interview w/ Tom De Wolf

Please Rate and Review us on your podcast app of choice!Get involved with Data Mesh Understanding's free community roundtables and introductions: https://landing.datameshunderstanding.com/If you want to be a guest or give feedback (suggestions for topics, comments, etc.), please see hereEpisode list and links to all available episode transcripts here.Provided as a free resource by Data Mesh Understanding. Get in touch with Scott on LinkedIn.Transcript for this episode (link) provided by Starburst. You can download their Data Products for Dummies e-book (info-gated) here and their Data Mesh for Dummies e-book (info gated) here.Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomdw/Data Mesh Belgium: https://www.meetup.com/data-mesh-belgium/Video by Tom: 'Platform Building for Data Mesh - Show me how it is done!': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG2g67RHYyoACA Group Data Mesh Landing Page: https://acagroup.be/en/services/data-mesh/In this episode, Scott interviewed Tom De Wolf, Senior Architect and Innovation Lead at ACA Group and Host of the Data Mesh Belgium Meetup.Some key takeaways/thoughts from Tom's point of view:Platform engineering, at its core, is about delivering a great and reliable self-service experience to developers. That's just as true in data as in software. Focus on automation, lowering cognitive load, hiding complexity, etc. If provisioning decision specifics don't matter, why make developers deal with them?The key to a good platform is something your users _want_ to use not simply must use. That's your user experience measuring stick.When building a platform, you want to hide a lot of the things that don't matter. But when you start, especially with a platform in data mesh, there will be many things you aren't sure if they matter. That's okay, automate those decisions that don't matter as you find them but exposing them early is normal/fine.Relatedly, make that hiding easy to see through the curtain if the developer cares. Sometimes it matters to 5% of use cases but also often, engineers really want to understand the details just because they are engineers 😅 Make a platform where people can customize their experience where possible without going overboard.?Controversial?: Few - if any - current tools in data are "aware" of the data product, they are still focused on their specific tasks instead of the target of creating an actual

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Interviews with data mesh practitioners, deep dives/how-tos, anti-patterns, panels, chats (not debates) with skeptics, "mesh musings", and so much more. Host Scott Hirleman (founder of the Data Mesh Learning Community) shares his learnings - and those of the broader data community - from over a year of deep diving into data mesh. Each episode contains a BLUF - bottom line, up front - so you can quickly absorb a few key takeaways and also decide if an episode will be useful to you - nothing worse than listening for 20+ minutes before figuring out if a podcast episode is going to be interesting and/or incremental ;) Hoping to provide quality transcripts in the future - if you want to help, please reach out! Data Mesh Radio is also looking for guests to share their experience with data mesh! Even if that experience is 'I am confused, let's chat about' some specific topic. Yes, that could be you! You can check out our guest and feedback FAQ, including how to submit your name to be a guest and how to submit feedback - including anonymously if you want - here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dDdb1mEhmcYqx3xYAvPuM1FZMuGiCszyY9x8X250KuQ/edit?usp=sharing Data Mesh Radio is committed to diversity and inclusion. This includes in our guests and guest hosts. If you are part of a minoritized group, please see this as an open invitation to being a guest, so please hit the link above. If you are looking for additional useful information on data mesh, we recommend the community resources from Data Mesh Learning. All are vendor independent. https://datameshlearning.com/community/ You should also follow Zhamak Dehghani (founder of the data mesh concept); she posts a lot of great things on LinkedIn and has a wonderful data mesh book through O'Reilly. Plus, she's just a nice person: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhamak-dehghani/detail/recent-activity/shares/ Data Mesh Radio is provided as a free community resource by DataStax. If you need a database that is easy to scale - read: serverless - but also easy to develop for - many APIs including gRPC, REST, JSON, GraphQL, etc. all of which are OSS under the Stargate project - check out DataStax's AstraDB service :) Built on Apache Cassandra, AstraDB is very performant and oh yeah, is also multi-region/multi-cloud so you can focus on scaling your company, not your database. There's a free forever tier for poking around/home projects and you can also use code DAAP500 for a $500 free credit (apply under payment options): https://www.datastax.com/products/datastax-astra?utm_source=DataMeshRadio