Feature Stores with Willem Pienaar

In a role reversal, my friend and former colleague Brenton Mallon interviews me about my life, from growing up in West Virginia to my winding path through grad school, data science, and beyond.

I sit down with Till Döhmen, AI Lead at MotherDuck, to explore the evolving landscape of AI-assisted SQL generation. Till brings a unique perspective from his PhD research in databases and his work building AI features at MotherDuck, the serverless data warehouse built on DuckDB.We discuss how text-to-SQL has matured from academic benchmarks to practical tools, the importance of documentation and schema context for agents, and the emerging role of MCP servers and skills in customizing agent behavior. Till shares insights on building trust in agent-generated queries, why thinking about what a new hire would need to know helps you build better AI workflows, and how agents are reshaping the analyst's role from SQL writing to question refinement.

Links Ben's Twitter [Ben’s Website]https://econoben.dev/) WorkHelix What Are AI Agents - O'Reilly Book Managing Memory for AI Agents - O'Reilly Book Bead Development Tool Subscribe RSS Feed Apple Podcasts Spotify Overcast In this episode of Into the Hopper, Tim talks with Ben Labishin from WorkHelix about AI agents and their impact on software development. Ben discusses AI memory management, practical strategies for using large language models, and the evolving role of developers in the age of AI. The conversation also addresses the balance between automation and foundational skills for junior engineers, offering valuable insights for professionals navigating this transformative landscape.

Find out more at podcast.tdhopper.com.

Find out more at podcast.tdhopper.com.

I talk with data science veteran Ravi Mody about his use of large language models in programming practice. Links: Ravi Mody on LinkedIn ChatGPT Claude.ai BBEdit Cursor Drew Conway's Data Science Venn Diagram

I talk with Jowanza Joseph about his new book Mastering Apache Pulsar: Cloud Native Event Streaming at Scale. Links: Jowanza's Pulsar talks Jowanza's Twitter Jowanza's website Pulsar homepage The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction by Jay Kreps StreamNative - Hosted Pulsar Datastax Astra Streaming - Hosted Pulsar Cloud Native Computing Foundation Pulsar Functions Pulsar IO Pulsar SQL Apache ZooKeeper Apache BookKeeper

I talk with Brenton Mallen about his career progression from ocean engineering to data science. Links: Brenton's Twitter Brenton's Instagram Brenton's Website Ocean Engineering at Florida Atlantic University

I talk with Roy Keyes about his imporant new book Hiring Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers. Links: Roy's Twitter Roy's Book Data Scientists at Work Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century by Thomas H. Davenport and D.J. Patil Building Data Science Teams by DJ Patil Find out more about Into the Hopper at podcast.tdhopper.com Music is Una Mañana Dorada by Silva de Alegria is licensed under a Attribution License. tdhopper.com — @tdhopper

Adam Laiacano and I talk with Willem Pienaar, software engineer at Tecton, about feature stores and his work on the Feast open source feature store library. Links: Willem's Twitter Adam's Twitter Feast: feature store for Machine Learning (2020 talk) Feast Tecton GoJek on Wikipedia featurestore.org Find out more about Into the Hopper at podcast.tdhopper.com Music is Una Mañana Dorada by Silva de Alegria is licensed under a Attribution License. tdhopper.com — @tdhopper