Episode description

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Transcript for this episode (link) provided by Starburst. You can download their Data Products for Dummies e-book (info-gated) here and their Data Mesh for Dummies e-book (info gated) here.

Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomdw/

Data Mesh Belgium: https://www.meetup.com/data-mesh-belgium/

Video by Tom: 'Platform Building for Data Mesh - Show me how it is done!': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG2g67RHYyo

ACA Group Data Mesh Landing Page: https://acagroup.be/en/services/data-mesh/

In this episode, Scott interviewed Tom De Wolf, Senior Architect and Innovation Lead at ACA Group and Host of the Data Mesh Belgium Meetup.

Some key takeaways/thoughts from Tom's point of view:

1. Platform engineering, at its core, is about delivering a great and reliable self-service experience to developers. That's just as true in data as in software. Focus on automation, lowering cognitive load, hiding complexity, etc. If provisioning decision specifics don't matter, why make developers deal with them?
2. The key to a good platform is something your users _want_ to use not simply must use. That's your user experience measuring stick.
3. When building a platform, you want to hide a lot of the things that don't matter. But when you start, especially with a platform in data mesh, there will be many things you aren't sure if they matter. That's okay, automate those decisions that don't matter as you find them but exposing them early is normal/fine.
4. Relatedly, make that hiding easy to see through the curtain if the developer cares. Sometimes it matters to 5% of use cases but also often, engineers really want to understand the details just because they are engineers 😅 Make a platform where people can customize their experience where possible without going overboard.
5. ?Controversial?: Few - if any - current tools in data are "aware" of the data product, they are still focused on their specific tasks instead of the target of creating an actual