The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Building Software with Intuition: Lessons from Multiple Successful Startups with Sokratis Vidros of Novu

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll get to meet our guest and hear about the topics we're going to cover. If they're interesting to you, you can catch the full-length show when it drops on Wednesday. Welcome back to the show. We have a special guest, Socrates Vidros, who was on the show three and a half years ago. We always say that we like to have people back on the show, John, but we actually do put our money where our mouth is. And sometimes it happens.

That's a lifetime in software. It is a lifetime in software. In episode 43, I think it was. Episode 43 in July of 2021. So Socrates, welcome back to the show after three and a half years. Hi, guys. Glad to be back. Time flies. We thought it was like two years ago, but like when we... I know, I know.

Oh, my God. All right. Well, give us the story. So give us your quick background. And we'll dig deeper when we dive into the full recording. But what were you doing three and a half years ago? And what are you doing today? So at the time, I was the founding engineer at Clerc. We just started with the team.

I think it was the very early days when we were building the first version of the software. Today, funnily enough, I'm involved in another early stage startup in the notification space called Novu. And I guess he actually caught me at the exact same state. So it's just going to be a repeat of the previous show. I mean, Claude did great. So I consider this to be a great coincidence. Yeah. Well, yeah, you're three years wiser now. So we're interested in hearing about your lessons. So speaking of topics, though, I really want to dig into, we've hit this theme a lot on the show recently, but we want to dig in with software engineering best practices and kind of the data best practices. We feel like there's a gap, but the gap is narrowing. So we're going

to dig in on that topic. What's a topic that you're interested in digging in on? I think the other interesting topic is basically to talk about the needs of engineers to wear multiple hats on a daily basis, meaning sometimes they have to be the product, sometimes they have to be the tester, sometimes they have to be both, especially in early stages where I specialize. The need there is very strong. Love it. Well, let's dig in. All right, sounds good.

All right, that's a wrap for the prequel. The full-length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don't miss it.