The PRQL: Why is Building Great AI Features so Hard? Featuring Barry McCardel of Hex

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 back to the show. We are here with one of my favorite guests we've had on, Barry McCardel from Hex. It has been a while, Barry, since you've been on the show. How long ago were you on?

I don't know, a couple, couple years ago maybe. Yeah, that's crazy.

It's been way too long. Well, for those who didn't catch the first episode, give us a quick overview of who you are and what Hex is.

Yeah. Well, thanks for having me back on. Hex is a collaborative platform for data science and analytics. We built it largely just to— it's an incredibly selfish company, really. It's just, we built the product we always wish we had. I've been a builder and user of data tools my whole career, and longest stint was at Palantir where I met my co-founders and a bunch of our team and got to sort of, you know, just build, build a lot of different data solutions for a lot of different data problems. And, you know, Hex is built to be this product, you know, we kind of call it like this multimodal product that is able to bring together teams and workflows and sort of unite them in one place around being able to work with data in a much more flexible, fast, and integrated way than the tools that we had sort of struggled with before. We can go deeper into that, but that's the high level.

All right. So one of the topics I'm excited about talking about is AI and BI together. So let's make sure we get to that topic. What other topics do you want to cover?

We can talk about a ton of things. I think the, it's a very interesting time in the data stack. As we're recording this, uh, the Snowflake and Databricks conferences were just over the last few weeks. So it was very interesting just being there and sort of good chance to check in on where data's going. I think the AI topic's super interesting and rich. Tons we could cover. Yeah.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, let's do it. Yeah, sounds good. 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.