Data Renegades

On episode 12 of Data Renegades, CL Kao sits down with Maxime Beauchemin to explore what happens when software teams start working alongside armies of AI agents. Max shares the thinking behind Agor, his collaborative platform for orchestrating coding agents, and reflects on how AI is reshaping engineering, product, design, and data work. They also dive into the future of agentic workflows, technical collaboration, and what human roles may look like in the years ahead.

On episode 10 of Data Renegades, CL Kao and Dori Wilson sit down with Toby Mao. They explore how real-world data problems at Netflix and Airbnb led to the creation of SQLGlot and SQLMesh, and why data modeling remains the hardest challenge in data engineering. The conversation also dives into how AI is reshaping engineering workflows, without replacing the need for strong architectural thinking.

On episode 8 of Data Renegades, CL Kao and Dori Wilson sit down with Scott Breitenother to explore how AI is reshaping the modern data stack and redefining the role of data teams. They discuss the evolution from spreadsheets to autonomous agents, the realities of data democratization, and why future workflows may revolve around one human working alongside multiple AI assistants. The conversation blends practical lessons from building Brooklyn Data and Kilo Code with forward-looking predictions about the next wave of data tooling.

On episode 6 of Data Renegades, CL Kao and Dori Wilson speak with Roger Magoulas about the real bottlenecks holding data organizations back. From the origins of “big data” to today’s explosion of tools and pipelines, the conversation focuses on why understanding, semantics, and communication matter more than ever. The episode is a call to shift from constant firefighting toward curiosity-driven insight.

In episode 4 of Data Renegades, CL Kao and Dori Wilson sit down with Micah Wylde. They trace his journey from building fraud detection at Sift Science to architecting massive real-time systems at Lyft and ultimately founding Arroyo. In this conversation, Micah breaks down the real complexity of streaming systems, why schema evolution is still the hardest challenge in data, and where the industry might move over the next five years.

In episode 2 of Data Renegades, CL Kao and Dori Wilson speak with Simon Willison. Together they dive into the origins of Datasette, the evolution of data journalism, and the surprising ways open source tools shape global reporting. Simon also explains how LLM-based agents will redefine data cleaning, enrichment, and analysis. A must-listen for anyone building or scaling data teams.