The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: From Programming Tic Tac Toe to Building an Operating System for Natural Language Programs With Binny Gill of Kognitos

Episode Date: June 3, 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 to the Data Stack Show. We're here with Benny Gill of Cognitos. Benny, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. Hey, Eric. Thanks for having me in the show. All right. Well, give us, tons to dive into, but give us just a brief background. Where'd you come from and just a little bit about Cognitos. Yeah, so I'm a software engineer by profession. I've been

writing code for 30 years. I started Cognitos about four years ago. And prior to that, I was CTO at a company called Nutanix. For about eight years, grew from zero to an IP and beyond. Great experience there. Learned a lot. My experience prior to that is in IBM research, mostly in the storage background, bringing cash technologies to the enterprise. Masters from UIUC and bachelor's in IIT Kanpur computer science. Grew up in India. Great. So, Benny, one of the topics I'm excited about talking about is the history of computer science, how that's evolved, and then this AI inflection point that we're at now and how things are changing, and then some really unique ways that your company's trying to solve those problems. Yeah, that's a topic very close

to my heart. When I was a teenager, I was programming and I had a handheld Casio graphing calculator which happened to also support basic programming and I had a large total of four kilobytes of memory where I used to fill in my basic programs and I had to be really careful about how much code I'm writing. One of the first cool programs I ever wrote was tic-tac-toe game. And it was easy, it was like lines and X's and O's, so it was doable. And I showed it off to my friends

and they were like, what is this? Said, no, this is a computer, but this is not an equation, no, this is basic language. Those were the days where there was no internet, there was no YouTube, I just had a manual. And I loved the power of making a machine operate in a way that was custom to what I wanted. That was the power that, you know, got me hooked.

And to date, you know, that's what keeps me happy with what I'm doing. Yeah, that's exciting. We're excited to dive into that. All right, well, let's dig in. 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.