DEWCon 2023: The Talks That Have Me Buzzing
Navigating the DEWCon Agenda, October 12, Bengaluru - India, at Taj Hotel [MG Road]
Last night, I was walking through the DEWCon registration and was delighted to see all the major unicorns of India and the prominent MNCs register to attend the conference.
So, here's a little backstory about how DEWCon came into being, and it's somewhat amusing. I was talking to Aswin one day and mentioned that I'd be in Bengaluru soon. "We should catch up," I said. Aswin floated the idea of making it a meetup—inviting some data engineers and having an in-depth conversation about our field.
In a half-joking manner, I threw out there, "Why not turn it into a full-blown data engineering conference?" We both chuckled and moved on. But the next day, it dawned on us that India didn't have a good data engineering conference—nothing like the Data Council in the U.S. or Crunch Conf in Europe.
And that's when our casual chat started to feel like a lightbulb moment. The joke suddenly seemed like a really good idea, and the rest, as they say, is history. We are genuinely trying our best and incredibly thankful to Nandini Raja, Shreeshail Degnial, Abdul Khader Shaik & Sabarish volunteers for the conference to take it to the next level.
The Talks I’m excited about
We are still waiting for the title from a few speakers, so I’m adding the one we know and vetted upfront.
Full Agenda: https://dewcon.ai/agenda/
Vinoth Chandar - Founder & CEO of One House:
Vinoth will be talking about evolution of the Data Engineering stack from Data Warehouse → Data Lake → Lake House architecture and how the Lake House architecture will shape the data engineering landscape in the future. I’m excited to hear from Vinoth, who shaped the Lake House architecture in many ways in the industry.
Joe Reis - Author, Fundamentals of Data Engineering
Joe Reis will talk about the importance of data modeling and how data modeling plays a critical role in the modern data stack. Data modeling is my favorite topic. The industry is swinging a pendulum from rigid centralized data modeling to throwing everything in a data lake to again data modeling. I’m excited to hear Joe’s take on this.
Panel: Is Modern Data Stack Dead?
The discussion around modern data stack is something I’m excited to have with Vinoth Chandar, Joe Reis, Divyansh Saini of Houseware & Shuveb Hussain of ZipStack. It is a perfect panel to discuss about the best-of-the-bread solutions vs one integrated solutions.
A Tale of Two Lake Houses: Ramesh Shanmugam [Branch Metrics], Ankur Ranjan [Walmart], Host: Ananth [yes, that’s me]
The adoption of LakeHouse is inevitably increasing. What architecture should you adopt to implement LakeHouse in your company? What kind of challenges you will be facing? I’m hosting a fireside chat with Ramesh from Branch Metrics and Ankur from Walmart about their experience operating scalable LakeHouse architecture.
BOLT: Reconciliation as a Product - Lakshmi Narasimhan [Flipkart]
I told Lakshmi the other day that only a few people realize how hard it is to have a reconciliation pipeline for bookkeeping. I’m excited to hear more about Flipkart, one of the pioneers in Indian e-commerce venture, about its reconciliation product.
Kamran Ali: Mastering the Fundamentals of Real-time Insights with Stream Processing [GoDaddy]
Many streaming frameworks are at our disposal, But before using any streaming. Engines, one must master fundamental concepts like Watermark, late-arriving data, etc. I’m looking forward to Kamran's talk covering some basics of stream processing engines.
Karin Wolek - Real-time market data enriched with LLM
LLM dominates the world, and products like ChatGPT live up to that expectation. There is a rush from every enterprise company to figure out how to incorporate GenAI into their product features and business operations. I’m excited to see the talk from Karin on data enrichment with LLM.
Vidhya Chandrasekar - Building Great Products with Data [PayPal]
Data is a product, and data as a Product is gaining tremendous attention across the board. Vidhya’s talk focuses on, from theory to adoption, how an organization should think about positioning data as a product to build great products with data.
Venkatesh Subramanian - Optimizing the journey of Data to Responsible AI/ML [Accenture]
AI/ML has a profound effect on human life and the community. It’s essential to adopt Responsible AI practices early on in the journey. Data Quality & handling sensitive data is critical in building the foundation for Responsible AI. In this talk, Venkatesh walks us through such a journey of data to responsible AI/ML.
Siddhant Agarwal - Unlocking the Future of Data Engineering: Integrating Generative AI and Slack Chatbots for Seamless Analytics - [Funding Societies]
Many focus on LLM with fancy product features, but what I liked about this talk is the focus on improving productivity and stakeholder experience.
See you at the Conference
The goal of DEWCon to create a healthy environment for the data practitoers to discuss the current trends in the industry, share their reference architecture and have fun. I learned a lot in many hallway conversation during the conference, so don’t miss out attending the conference. I heard the after party at the Taj is awesome!!!
Registration Here: https://dewcon.ai/
Use the discount code: DATAHERO for 50% discount