Scale By the Bay 2023: Interview with Ben Church.
Recording: Scale By the Bay 2023: Interview with Ben Church.
my name is Ben church I work for a company here in the Bay Area called airite so airb is a data platform right it's an integration layer where we take data from all your disparate sources right you can have them in um your ads platforms you can have them in other databases you can have them in random apis and help you Wrangle them uh and put them where you want it to go whether that's a analytics data store or or somewhere else so my role at airite is I'm just a engineer specifically I work on the connector Ops Team so I'm responsible for taking our connector code so the things that either gets data out or puts data somewhere you need it taking that code putting into containers certifying them and ultimately releasing them to either open source platform or our Cloud platform form for use I think the majority of developers and Engineers or anyone technical probably is using AI in their workflow in some way um on the technical side right co-pilot is something that I'm using daily right I'm using chat GPT to answer and search for questions daily uh when it comes to some more like bespoke use cases I'm finding myself with my own personal project really gravitating towards uh answering questions solving problems using these large language models in the talk I gave today you know that was how do I interpret all my Strava data better um looking ahead I've got my eyes on how can I create dashboards more declaratively right how can I go from data to UI in a simpler way you know there's a few things rattling around the back of my head but mostly day-to-day it's it's co co-pilot there's one talk on like why you shouldn't use hascal as a startup um that's a personal pain point for me so I'm curious to see see what they're talking about there I've always got a long list I think like anyone who likes to Tinker and build stuff will like their list exceeds time right I mentioned there's some tinkering I want to do on how do I go from structured data to D dashboards there's another piece of I think these models will be really good at scraping context out of websites and I kind want to take that one step further with um can you scrape some really interesting marketplaces like Unity 3D has like models for a sale I'm really curious what's the most uh popular model to purchase in there where you don't typically have that however you know uh life's busy life's full I I'd be curious if I get to it um I have a child on the way do in February so so I'm sure that will take up time and I just inherited a old 1957 Triumph motorcycle which I I'm going to piss off so many of the old guys on my street because I want to convert it to an electric and that's also in the backlog so we'll see we'll see where the year takes me so this is my first time at scale by the bay this is actually my first time in Oakland and I think if I had a friend who wanted to come down here it's it's a twofold recommendation one I spent yesterday walking around Oakland uh checking out a couple breweries doab beir was one uh I was walking along the water to get here today and it's it's a cool City it's it's fun the people are nice there's a lot to do here I would for sure come back so like I think any pitch to a conference is what's the location because it's it's always more about than just the talks on the other side of the recommendation though I think scale by the bay because of its location and because of the people who are putting it on it's attracting um a really high bar of technical leaders and thinkers and attendees so all the conversations I've had here and the talks I've seen so far have been fantastic they've been interesting they've um left me with something I didn't have before so that that would be my recommendation like Oakland's awesome but also the people that are attending here will kind of um give you New Perspectives