Summary

Businesses often need to be able to ingest data from their customers in order to power the services that they provide. For each new source that they need to integrate with it is another custom set of ETL tasks that they need to maintain. In order to reduce the friction involved in supporting new data transformations David Molot and Hassan Syyid built the Hotlue platform. In this episode they describe the data integration challenges facing many B2B companies, how their work on the Hotglue platform simplifies their efforts, and how they have designed the platform to make these ETL workloads embeddable and self service for end users.

Announcements

• Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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• Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Once you sign up and create an alert in Datafold for your company data, they will send you a cool water flask.
• This episode of Data Engineering Podcast is sponsored by Datadog, a unified monitoring and analytics platform built for developers, IT operations teams, and businesses in the cloud age. Datadog provides customizable dashboards, log management, and machine-learning-based alerts in one fully-integrated platform so you can seamlessly navigate, pinpoint, and resolve performance issues in context. Monitor all your databases, cloud services, containers, and serverless functions in one place with Datadog’s 400+ vendor-backed integrations. If an outage occurs, Datadog provides seamless navigation between your logs, infrastructure metrics, and application traces in just a few clicks to minimize downtime. Try it yourself today by starting a free 14-day trial and receive a Datadog t-shirt after installing the agent. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datadog today to see how you can enhance visibility into your stack with Datadog.
• Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing David Molot and Hassan Syyid about Hotglue, an embeddable data integration tool for B2B developers built on the Python ecosystem.

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• Can you start by describing what you are building at Hotglue?
  • What was your motivation for starting a business to address this particular problem?
• Who is the target user of Hotglue and what are their biggest data problems?
  • What are the types and sources of data that they are likely to be working with?
  • How are they currently handling solutions for those problems?
  • How does the introduction of Hotglue simplify or improve their work?
• What is involved in getting Hotglue integrated into a given customer’s environment?
• How is Hotglue itself implemented?
  • How has the design or goals of the platform evolved since you first began building it?
  • What were some of the initial assumptions that you had at the outset and how well have they held up as you progressed?
• Once a customer has set up Hotglue what is their workflow for building and executing an ETL workflow?
  • What are their options for working with sources that aren’t supported out of the box?
• What are the biggest design and implementation challenges that you are facing given the need for your product to be embedded in customer platforms and exposed to their end users?
• What are some of the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Hotglue used?
• What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while building Hotglue?
• When is Hotglue the wrong choice?
• What do you have planned for the future of the product?

Contact Info

• David
  • @davidmolot on Twitter
  • LinkedIn
• Hassan
  • hsyyid on GitHub
  • LinkedIn

Parting Question

• From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Closing Announcements

• Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, Podcast.__init__ to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used.
• Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes.
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Links

• Hotglue
• Python
  • The Python Podcast.__init__
• B2B == Business to Business
• Meltano
  • Podcast Episode
• Airbyte
• Singer

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA