MIT Press Essential Knowledge

I've been a fool.

I’ve been an absolute fool. Again. I have been taking for granted that what I have been doing was just about all there is to be done, and while I have understood for a while that a lot goes on above my head, I have applied the wrong filter.

You see when I discovered Vertica, Dr. Stonebraker’s brilliant database over a decade ago, when I found that MongoDB was some POS, or was it CouchDB? When I considered that NoSQL was just an excuse for techbros to not write a semantic layer for their experiments, I rather dismissed a lot that I now really want to understand, namely Data Science in a false opposition to Data Engineering. But the most foolish thing I’ve done was to ignore MIT Press and MIT Open Courseware.

I’ve known these things existed for many years, and somehow I had convinced myself that everything of value was crammed over into the possession of the Stanford Mafia - that they had monetized everything and anything of value in the big data space and that basically Hortonworks was all they had to show for it. Meanwhile I bought into the idea that VLDB that wasn’t owned by Teradata and OLAP that wasn’t Essbase or Netezza was not worth considering. So I invested my time and energy into dealing with the few significant customers that I had with Vertica. Meanwhile I’m listening to the Data Skeptic podcast with a nagging feeling.

At the same time, when I took time to understand Bitcoin’s proof of work, and saw that [again] I couldn’t get any traction for blockchain-based accounting, I just threw my hands up. Everything I could see seemed to be scam-level tech. I now believe I have been looking for love in all the wrong places.

I already know that there are almost no shows on TV I can be bothered to watch out of sheer boredom. I gave up on broadcast news in the 90s. So why did I spend so much time trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the Humanities? Because I thought I was as close to the cutting edge of commercially viable big data as I could get, outside of Google who had been losing the battle against AWS in just about every respect.

Now I have bothered to actually play with GBQ and I like it, more than I liked Redshift. And I have no reason to believe that it is inferior to Snowflake, and it’s probably cheaper, well, yes it is for my purposes.

So I’m scolding myself in public, which may serve as a warning to you. No matter how crappy the public gets, no matter how retarded the market gets, there are always serious practitioners out there. They may be very difficult to find, but you’ll probably run across some of them at MIT. Much more likely than Udemy, or just about any place online. Stupid me, I was watching the movies and I should have read the books.

MIT Press Essential Knowledge (Amazon)

MIT Press Essential Knowledge (Goodreads)