Introducing Keyboard and Quill

Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi introduce our limited series podcast, Keyboard and Quill, launching in March 2024: https://stree.ai/keyboardandquill

Fear not, Tim will continue to host our weekly podcast for data professionals, Real-Time Analytics with Tim Berglund: https://stree.ai/podcast

ABOUT KEYBOARD AND QUILL
Keyboard and Quill is a playful, narrative podcast exploring data and technology through time. Co-hosted by Silicon Valley database startup veterans, Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi, and inspired by the soundscapes of NPR’s award-winning Radiolab, Keyboard and Quill is a lively look at how we went from the wheel to the smartphone–from the printing press to the complex data ecosystems powering our modern lives. Tim and Rachel interview academics, philosophers, technologists, thought leaders, cofounders, software engineers, and a variety of other Silicon Valley professionals.

Transcript

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- Welcome to a special announcement of the "Real-Time Analytics" podcast. I'm your host, Tim Berglund. Now, if you're a regular listener to this show, you know what we do here. We talk about real-time analytics, broadly construed, but from a very technical perspective. I'm talking to the people who build systems out of components like Kafka and Pinot and Flink and things like that, and I'm speaking to guests who do that same work, and I'm speaking as one of you. It's a very technical thing. Now, there's a broader perspective sometimes that it's useful to have. Why are these things happening? What are the broad historical movements and ideas and kind of underlying concepts that are driving this work we're doing? There's a lot of important work going on in tech right now involved in this pivot to real-time, but what's going on behind that? Well, that's not really what we talk about on the "Real-Time Analytics" podcast, and so we're making a special series. Enter "Keyboard and Quill." That's what we're calling it. It's a series that's gonna launch early in 2024. This is gonna be a fun, maybe sometimes a little heady, intricately produced podcast about the evolution of data and technology and the systems that power our daily lives. How did meal delivery like Uber Eats and DoorDash get started? Why did they get started? Why is real-time even a good idea? Why is life so much more fast-paced than it used to be? We'll take a look at the evolution of mobile devices and how those have helped drive all this. So we think this is gonna be very much of interest to you, our regular listeners, and of broader interest to anybody who works in tech, and the people you know who don't even work in tech. It's gonna tell the story of the work we do on this podcast, but from a much broader and less technically detailed perspective. You can kind of think of it like "Radiolab," if you know that podcast, meets The History Channel, except I'm the one writing the outline. I'm really excited about this. And again, just to be clear, it's not replacing this podcast. We're still gonna have weekly interviews, as many technical deep dives as we can all manage, so this is gonna be a new thing we're launching in addition. And if you want an idea of what it's gonna sound like, take a listen to this teaser.(radio static whirring)(people chattering)- Okay.- All right.- Hi.- And then you're-(people laughing)- One more time?(pencil scratching)(bright music)- You're listening to.- "Keyboard & Quill."- From StarTree.- Creators of the Real-Time Analytics Summit.- And podcast.(bright music)- [Rachel] I'm gonna tell you a little story.- Okay.- I go on a walk, I'm listening to my favorite podcast, and I get this text message.- That's-- Ding!- [Tim] Real-Time Analytics Podcast, come on.- [Rachel] Yes, it... No, it wasn't actually, but it would be. And I get this ding, and I look down and it's Tim saying,"Hey, Rachel, you wanna do a podcast? It's gonna be kind of like Radiolab meets a techie History Channel." And I'm like, “okay.”- [Tim] Yes, I remember that. It seemed like you took between 50 and 75 microseconds to consider it. You said yes. I'd barely given you any of the pitch, and you were in.- [Rachel] In like Flynn.- [Tim] That is what I like about you.(Rachel chuckles) So.- [Rachel] So here we are! We're doing the podcast.- [Tim] We're doing a podcast.(bright music) Hi, I'm Tim Berglund.- And I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- [Tim] And you are listening to "Keyboard & Quill."- [Rachel] A playful narrative podcast exploring data and technology through time.- [Tim] You know, what we do is you and I work with data.- All day.- Yeah.- [Rachel] Every day.- [Tim] You're a once and future guest on the podcast, but, you know, there is a broader context to these things, and I think we all take for granted how much real-time data powers our smartphones and how much of our lives is mediated through them. We track our Amazon packages, meal through DoorDash, catching an Uber, Waze to get you through somebody's cul-de-sac to get where you're going on time. There's a lot of this.- [Rachel] Yeah. I think people take for granted the leaps in technology that have happened, and that it builds upon so much innovation. Holy cow! I mean, all you have to do is go down to the Computer Science Museum and see what led to the beginnings of the mainframe, which changed the world.- [Tim] I was just there actually on Saturday and I saw the 1401 demo. 1959 was when the 1401 was released. It just looks like an industry blinking in the light after just waking up. You know, like just stumbling around, making this thing that barely got the job done. 16,000 characters of memory and I don't know how many operations a second it could do. Not too dang many. That's an amazing achievement.- [Rachel] I think we have a really big story to tell there.- [Tim] Yeah, we do.- [Rachel] But the cool thing about the California life and being where we are in the Silicon Valley, we have access to so many different people who have done so many cool things, really even the last 20 years.- [Tim] Yeah, yeah. A lot of that work has been geographically isolated here historically. And so you'll have companies like Google, AWS, Microsoft.- [Rachel] DoorDash, Uber, LinkedIn.- [Tim] Yes. All of those. Those are key players in this space. And I'm looking forward to talking to as many of them as we can.- [Rachel] Yeah.- [Tim] But you know what? Those are our people. We know that, and that's kinda what we do normally. We're gonna have to talk to some other people, some academics, historians, authors, maybe some philosophers.- Yeah.- Because all the history of the innovation in technology and data that even led us to a modern society is, I think, really dang interesting. And Rachel, we can't forget our podcast team.- [Rachel] And who doesn't love our team?- [Tim] I certainly do. Helping us craft episodes and find stories will be our producers, Peter and Noelle.- [Peter] Hi everyone. Peter here.- [Noelle] Hi there. This is Noelle.- [Tim] And let's not forget our incredibly talented composer, music producer and mixer, Jeff Kite.- [Jeff] Hello everyone, this is Jeff.- [Rachel] Isn't Jeff the guy who made a song with Daft Punk?- [Tim] That is him, and now he's jamming with us.- [Rachel] Wow! I can't wait to see what he does with this.- [Tim] One word, Rachel. Soundscapes.(Rachel laughs) Soundscapes. Soundscapes. Soundscapes.(horse neighing)(hooves thudding) Anyway, to our listeners out there, we hope you'll join us for this at stree.ai/keyboardandquill That's S-T-R-E-E.ai / keyboardandquill as we journey through history and learn about data, technology, and the systems that power our modern lives.- [Rachel] And I think we might just have some fun along the way.- [Tim] How can we not? Again, stree.ai/keyboardandquill You'll find links to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, all the places. You know what to do.- [Rachel] Ooh! But Tim, will you still keep doing the StarTree weekly podcast?- [Tim] Yeah, yes, I absolutely will! For our fellow software developers and data professionals specifically interested in real-time analytics, feel free to check out the Real-Time Analytics Podcast, which we launched in early 2023. New episodes every Monday. Link in the show notes. With that, I'm Tim Berglund.- [Rachel] And I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- [Tim] We'll see you soon on "Keyboard and Quill."(bright music)