E39 - Big Data and Machine Learning with Nick Caldwell

Episode 39 of the Hacker Noon Podcast: An interview with Nick Caldwell CPO at Looker and former VP of engineering at Reddit. Listen to the interview on iTunes, or Google Podcast, or watch on YouTube.

In this episode Trent Lapinski interviews Nick Caldwell from Looker, you get to learn about big data, machine learning and AI.

"Modern data stores are extremely powerful. You can put tons and tons of data into them. You can query them without losing speed. And in some cases, you can even do analytics in the database. We're just seeing this trend where the data layer is becoming more and more powerful, and Looker is riding that trend."

"My favorite learning, again, was just what's going on in the data engineering space. The BigQuery to me, at that time, was just mind blowing. You dump 4-5 petabytes of data in a big data store and query it all at once. It's stunning to me. I didn't know this thing was possible. And you can do that in an affordable fashion."

"My degree was focused in Machine Learning, and I think nowadays when people ask me about that sort of formal education, I tell them, 'You probably don't need it.' You can get really, really far in Machine Learning and just focus on the practical applications of it, without having to understand the underlying Mathematics of it. I think that's a really powerful thing, that abstraction."

—Nick Caldwell

Production and music by Derek Bernard - haberdasherband.com/production

Host: Trent Lapinski - https://trentlapinski.com

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