The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Solopreneurship, Streaming Data, and Synthetic Testing with Michael Drogalis of ShadowTraffic.io

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

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 guests 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 are here with Michael Drogalas of Shadow Traffic. Michael, welcome to the Data Sack Show.

Hey, thanks for having me. All right, well, we have a ton to get into. Of course, I'm passionate about streaming data, and so we're gonna go deep on that, and we're gonna talk about solopreneurship and a number of other things. But first, just give our guests a brief background. How'd you get into data and end up at Shadow Traffic?

Yeah, by trade I'm a software engineer. I think the last thing that kind of inspired me as I was coming out of college was distributed systems and streaming data. They were all kind of really getting started around like 2010 or 2011. And I went out and I built an open source project. I ended up building a company on top of that. I sold it to Confluent. And then recently I left to go start Shadow Trap Pack,

which we'll talk about that. It's sort of the inspiration of all the problems that I've seen occurring in the last 10 years or so. And yeah, awesome. So Michael, we were talking before the show, doing a little bit of show prep. So many cool topics here. Eric already mentioned one solopreneur thing. I've just, I've been reading a lot about that and people are all like, prep. So many cool topics here.

Eric already mentioned one solopreneur thing. I've been reading a lot about that and people are like, who's going to be the first $100 million solopreneur? So that's a fun topic. And then the streaming topic is just a fun one. It's been going on a long time and I think a lot's happening there. What are some topics you're interested in covering? Yeah, it's always fun kind of going into the details of the problems around synthetic data. I think people look at it and they think, well, I can just use chat GPT to create some data or I can just write a little script to do it. And in some simple cases you can, but as you start to go down this path and you need to build more and more cases that reflect production scenarios, it's actually a lot harder than you think.

And reaching for a tool or it has that defined as a set of abstractions that help you, it's fun to go into the motivation behind those things and the use cases and such. Well, let's dig in. All right, let's do it. 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.