Scott Haines

Scott Haines (Linkedin / Substack) calls himself a reluctant data engineer. It started with video games - then taking apart the family stereo to see how it worked - then writing the backend Java APIs and the real-time ranking engine behind Yahoo Games. (with a few more steps in between)

An early Spark user, Scott drove its adoption with Twilio's Voice Insights team, building stream and batch platforms handling tens of billions of messages a day. As a Distinguished Software Engineer at Nike, Scott's team collapsed 52,000 clickstream event types down to 133 and took the pipeline bill from $4,000 a day to $16. Currently, Scott is a Staff Developer Advocate and OSS Engineer at Databricks - the perfect home for a Spark OG, where he supports Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, Iceberg, and of course - Spark.

A longtime author, Scott most recently co-authored Delta Lake: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly)

Check out some of Scott's recent interviews and presentations:
From Data Pipelines to AI Agents: Engineering the Future of Intelligent Systems (O'Reilly)
4 Lessons Learned the Hard Way and How Thinking Small Saved the Day (MotherDuck)
Scott Haines on the Future of Data Engineering (DataEngineeringDan)

Kierra Dotson (Provocateur)

Kierra Dotson (Linkedin / Substack) first joined us at Data Day Texas 2025 - apparently, it was her first data conference. By the end of the event, it was evident to many that she was not only an Animateur - but a Provocateur as well. How could we not invite her back as a speaker for DDTX26?

It's difficult to write a brief bio for Kierra, as she has packed so much into the first decade of her career. Before graduating from UT Austin in CS, she had already logged internships in software engineering, Android development, and the HR analytics work at Visa that pulled her into data before she knew to call it that. After graduation, Visa kept her on as a data engineer.

Then came seven years at IBM Cloud. She worked on Key Protect, its encryption service. When the team's technical writer left, she filled in for six months and wrote one of IBM's first pieces on quantum computing. Then DevOps and SRE. Then, after a reorg, the Kubernetes control planes under 58 critical cloud services - thousands of clusters. On the side, on nights and weekends, Charles Schwab and Chewy hired her to architect what she'd built at Visa.

Then AI. Six months as an AI engineer in IBM Client Engineering - Fortune 500 clients, Verizon among them. And now, Further, a data, cloud, and AI company, where she is Director of AI Strategy & Governance.

Governance as code came out of a conversation with Juan Sequeda at Data Day Texas 2025. Take the policies out of the PDFs. Put them in YAML, under version control. Let the pipeline enforce them. At the same event she asked a room of engineers how many had read the NIST frameworks - blank stares. Her answer: engineers have to become strategic engineers. Juan says that's a t-shirt.

Layoffs. Nobody sure which skills to bet on, or which way to jump. Kierra keeps moving - and keeps telling everyone else how she does it. Talks, interviews, mentoring. She also runs The Data Bloq, a career advisory practice. She is what Data AI Weekend is for.

Check out Kierra's interviews on Catalog and Cocktails, Day in My Tech Life, and Hacker Proof HQ. Good stuff. But she's someone you want to be in the room with - connect with her at Data AI Weekend.

Kierra and Ivo Sokolov will co-host the following Data AI Weekend session: Between the Strategy Deck and the Invoice: Data Platform and AI Economics for 2027.

Karl Ivo Sokolov (Underwriter)

Karl Ivo Sokolov (LinkedIn / Substack) goes by Ivo. He started as a software developer. Then Deloitte - data analytics and forensics. Then managing director and division head at an Austrian bank, running the data office, where he built one of the first compliant cloud data warehouses for a eurozone systemically relevant bank - and helped found the European Cloud User Coalition, a group of European banks trying to get regulators to agree on what a cloud actually is.

Today Ivo is managing partner at Specific-Group in Vienna, where he built the Data & AI practice from zero to more than 40 people - with delivery hubs in Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Valencia. He's a Certified Management Accountant and sits on the Global Board of IMA, the Institute of Management Accountants. He is co-author of Finance-Grade Data & AI Products: The VANE Loop Framework.

Vienna is a museum, Ivo likes to say. He'd like to keep it that way. Just not the IT departments.

Check out Ivo's Specific Data & Strategy show on YouTube. It's a good place to see Data Day Texas alumni whom you might have missed - like Sol Rashidi, Chris Tabb, Veronika Durgin, Ole Olesen-Bagneux, Lisa Cao, Paul Dudley, and Shachar Meir. Good stuff.

Ivo and Kierra Dotson will co-host the following Data AI Weekend session: Between the Strategy Deck and the Invoice: Data Platform and AI Economics for 2027.

Matt Housley

Matt Housley first joined us at Data Day Texas 2023 - our first full post-COVID edition. He and Joe Reis co-hosted the first Data Town Hall, having just co-authored Fundamentals of Data Engineering - which is well on its way to becoming the Dark Side of the Moon of Data Engineering books.

Matt's backstory is short. PhD in math. Visiting assistant professor at BYU, then Utah. Then data science at Overstock - where the data science worked and the productionizing didn't. That's how he became a data engineer. Ternary Data followed, with Joe, where he was CTO for six and a half years. He has been running Halfpipe Systems since 2018.

Matt got into data late enough to see several generations at once - Teradata still in the basement, Hadoop the cool kid, then Spark, Redshift, Snowflake. He says that's why he and Joe could write the book. They weren't in the guts of Hadoop, so they could see the whole thing.

At Data Day Texas 2025 Matt met Tony Baer (Linkedin). Two months later they launched It's About Data - Tony from the analyst side, Matt from the practitioner side, one or two episodes a week. They returned to Data Day Texas 2026 - the Final Edition - to record interviews on site. This turned out to be a massive blessing to the 200+ people who missed Data Day Texas because of the ice storm.

Matt is also the technical editor for Ryan Dolley's forthcoming book on AI and BI (Wiley). He teaches - a data engineering class last fall, O'Reilly training on Data Engineering Workflows.

On the hype, he's steady. Arthur C. Clarke said any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Matt's point is that the cracks appeared a while ago and people kept believing anyway. We confuse scale with intelligence. The analyst firms work like the fashion industry - nothing gets invented from nothing, so every new season has to reference a classic. Data mesh comes back as context. Last year was the year of agents. Nobody is running agents in production.

"The more we're in the age of AI and online media, the more face-to-face matters. Yes, I want to read what you have to say. I want to listen to your podcast. But I want to talk to you in person - get an impression, ask questions, break bread."
- Matt Housley

Thais Cooke (Translator)

After transitioning from dentistry into data analytics in 2021, Thais Cooke (Linkedin) quickly established herself as a versatile data professional, currently serving as a Senior Data Analyst. Her unique background bridges clinical expertise with analytical thinking, bringing fresh perspectives to data challenges across industries. Thais is the creator of the LinkedIn Learning course: SQL for Healthcare Professionals and an upcoming course on Data Governance with a focus on healthcare.

Thais has shared insights on popular industry podcasts including Data Podcast for Nerds!, Mavens of Data, and How to Get an Analytics Job, and has been featured as a speaker at MDS Fest. Thais is dedicated to making data accessible, focusing on practical solutions that connect technical concepts with real-world applications. When not immersed in datasets and visualizations, Thais can be found buried in books, writing, experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen, or enjoying family time.

Aaron Black

Over the years there has been a chorus from our speakers - many of them O'Reilly authors - asking us to get Aaron Black (Linkedin) - an acquisitions editor at O'Reilly. So in 2026 I asked my longtime O'Reilly friend Marsee Henon - and she helped make it happen. Aaron gave a featured presentation - How To Get Published in Tech. He also hosted an informal discussion AMA session.

Aaron is not the editing kind of editor. He doesn't care about the commas. He's the Jonah Jameson kind - the one who says what the story is, who gets it, when it's due, and who answers for it if the Daily Bugle fails.

Aaron has been in books since 1999. Foreign rights at a literary agency in New York. General manager of a Barnes & Noble in Carmel, Indiana. Then Pearson, then Wiley - For Dummies, WROX, VISUAL - then Apress under Springer Nature, where he rebranded the maker line. Partnerships with Facebook and the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Twenty-seven years.

Ask Aaron where book ideas come from and he'll tell you - it isn't the lone genius in a room. Ideas come from networks - from conversations, corporate use cases, podcast arguments, conference hallways. "It's not inspiration, it's participation."

Winfried Etzel

An increasingly prominent voice in the global data community, Winfried Etzel champions Data Governance, Data Strategy, and organizational design. Through his #MetaDAMA podcast and his work building the Nordic data community, Winfried drives professional development across the region. His upcoming book, «Data Governance in the Wild», explores how Data Governance must evolve for distributed landscapes, automation, and AI.

Catch Winfried's insights on the Data Democracy Podcast, Catalog and Cocktails, and his A Journey around the World of Data with Joe Reis.

Alexandra Pasi (Catalyst)

Alexandra (Lexi) Pasi (Linkedin) is the CEO and co-founder of Lucidity Sciences. A mathematician and logician by training, Alexandra has applied that knowledge in a variety of business and technical domains, establishing herself as a dynamic strategist, data leader, and ML innovator. She completed her PhD in Mathematics at Baylor University, receiving the Outstanding Dissertation Award for her interdisciplinary work in logic and formal systems. Her work in machine learning began in 2011, with theoretical and applied research in kernel learning methods. With a group of collaborators, she expanded on that work to develop a novel, general-purpose, highly-scalable ML approach - one which significantly and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art ensemble solutions in accuracy, latency, and compactness. With her team at Lucidity Sciences, she has brought that same technology to market with successful applications in various industries from medicine to finance.

Check out Alexandra's 2024 interview on The Joe Reis Show (spotify), her recent interview on The Applied AI Podcast (spotify / youtube), and her recent interview on Working / Broken (spotify).

Juan Sequeda (Synthesizer)

Dr. Juan Sequeda is a Principal Fundamental Researcher at ServiceNow, joining through the acquisition of data.world. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin. Juan's research and industry work has been on the intersection of data and AI, with the goal to reliably create knowledge from inscrutable data, specifically designing and building Knowledge Graph for enterprise data and metadata management. Juan is the co-author of the book "Designing and Building Enterprise Knowledge Graph" and the co-host of Catalog and Cocktails, an honest, no-bs, non-salesy data podcast. Juan serves as a strategic and innovation bridge across Product/Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and Customer, ensuring technical insights are aligned with business value.

Juan has researched and developed technology on semantic data virtualization, graph data modeling, schema mapping and data integration methodologies. He pioneered technology to construct knowledge graphs from relational databases starting in the mid 2000s, resulting in W3C standards, research awards, patents, software and his startup Capsenta acquired by data.world in 2019. Juan strives to build bridges between academia and industry as former co-chair of the LDBC Property Graph Schema Working Group, member of the LDCB Graph Query Languages task force, standards editor at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Juan continues to be an active member of the scientific community through academic research partnerships, advising students, and member of data and AI scientific conference committees.

Bill Inmon

Bill Inmon (Wikipedia / LinkedIn) is an American computer scientist, recognized by many as the father of the data warehouse. Inmon wrote the first book, held the first conference, wrote the first column in a magazine and was the first to offer classes in data warehousing. Inmon created the accepted definition of what a data warehouse is - a subject oriented, nonvolatile, integrated, time variant collection of data in support of management's decisions. Bill is among the most prolific and well-known authors in the big data analysis, data warehousing and business intelligence arena. In addition to authoring more than 50 books and 650 articles, Bill has been a monthly columnist with the Business Intelligence Network, EIM Institute and Data Management Review. In 2007, Bill was named by Computerworld as one of the "Ten IT People Who Mattered in the Last 40 Years" of the computer profession.

Jessica Talisman (Wayfinder)

Jessica Talisman is a taxonomist, information architect, and professional data wrangler. Over her 25 years of experience in the information & data architecture world, Jessica has worked as an academic librarian and for The US Department of Justice, Overstock.com, Pluralsight and Amazon. She currently works as a Senior Information Architect for Adobe. Jessica holds a Master of Library and Information Science and a Masters in Teaching.

Check out Jessica's recent interviews on the Monday Morning Data Chat, Discovering Data, Knowledge Graph Insights, Blueprints for Success, Catalog and Cocktails, Data Dialogues, Data Democracy, The AI Digest, and How AI is Built.

Serg Masís

Serg Masís (LinkedIn) is a Climate and Agronomic Data Scientist at Syngenta, a leading agribusiness company with a mission to improve global food security. Whether it pertains to leisure activities, plant diseases, or customer lifetime value, Serg is passionate about providing the often-missing link between data and decision-making. Serg is author of Interpretable Machine Learning with Python, now in its 2nd edition. Serg is also working on two upcoming titles: DIY AI: Step-By-Step Artificial Intelligence Projects for Makers and Hackers, and Building Responsible AI with Python. Learn more at Serg.ai.

Annie Nelson (Facilitator)

Annie Nelson is a Data Analyst at GitLab, content creator, and author of How to Become a Data Analyst. She has a background in psychology, and was previously a nanny and an occupational therapist before teaching herself data analytics and switching careers. Annie now creates content about data careers, when she's not working, traveling, or spending time outdoors.

Check out her interview with John David Ariansen on the How to Get an Analytics Job Podcast, and her YouTube channel: Annie's Analytics.

Matthew Mullins

Matthew Mullins (Linkedin) has spent over 20 years at the intersection of government and enterprise, building and delivering data solutions that drive informed decision-making. Currently CTO and co-founder at Coginiti, the collaborative data operations platform, Matthew leads the product and engineering teams. With deep expertise in data strategy, analytics, and technology implementation, he has helped organizations harness the power of data to solve complex challenges. If he's not solving data challenges, you'll find him floating or standing in a river fly fishing.

Ryan Boyd

Bio to come.

Trey Blalock

A highly respected Chief Information Security Officer and security researcher, Trey Blalock (Linkedin) has performed extensive work in almost every security domain for some of the world's largest corporations and governments. Trey has trained thousands of people on advanced security topics, and has taught security classes at many organizations - including AT&T, BCBS, BECU, CIA, CISA, DHS, DIA, FBI, IBM, NSA, RCMP, T-Mobile, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Marines, U.S. Navy, U.S. Secret Service. He has served as a Computer Forensic Expert Witness for the U.S. Department of Justice on multiple cases, including handling all aspects of computer forensics on some high-profile cases such as "Donald Vance vs. Donald Rumsfeld," "John Doe vs. Donald Rumsfeld" and "American Boat Company vs. United States."

Trey also specializes in defending large-scale systems from advanced threat actors, and currently serves on several forensic, red teaming, and penetration testing advisory boards. Through his consulting practice, Verification Labs, Trey has managed hundreds of security events for companies, including dozens of ransomware events, security breaches, denial-of-service attacks, and over one hundred forensic incidents.

Trey's Data Day Texas 2026 session - The Weaponization of AI, Its Impact on Organizations, and How to Respond - was the one people were still posting about on LinkedIn a week later, mostly some version of omfg.

Tim Frazer

Tim Frazer was working in a grocery store in Vancouver, doing logistics and operations, when he found himself at a gathering of biostatisticians and watched one of the pioneers of Python demonstrate what a package could do. He remembers the thought exactly: he could stop treating his spreadsheets as the work and start treating them as inputs. He had been automating them out of impatience for years without knowing that was a job.

He is homeschooled and self-taught - no computer science degree, no bootcamp - and he got there through books, ERP systems, kitchens, and asking a great many questions. A few years later he talked his way into a role at a New York startup by learning Ruby on Rails fast, noticed the data team next door solving more interesting problems, and discovered there was a title for what he had already been doing. Today he is Director of Data Engineering & Analytics at Trust & Will, running a lean team and leading a migration to an Apache Iceberg lakehouse. He tends to get called in when a data team or platform is struggling to keep up, or doesn't know where to start.

Tim thinks about architecture the way he thinks about a plate - the ingredients, how they come together, and the fact that too many spices ruin it. He writes about the self-taught path at Self-Taught Engineer, taught data and Python at BrainStation for three years, has coached well over a hundred engineers and analysts, and still mentors someone new most weeks.