Michael Irvine

LinkedIn screenshot of George Fraser, Fivetran CEO, showing a work history consisting of “Scientist at Emerald Therapeutics, 2011-2012” followed by CEO at Fivetran ever since.

What’s Fivetran’s story, anyway? This is a wild work history, lol

A SNOW/DBX acquisition could still happen, of course. But I really hope it doesn’t, and that this gives the dbt/Fivetran combo (Sixtran? dbtran?) the gravity it needs to stand on its own long term.

I’m happy about the dbt/Fivetran merger.

Ultimately, it’s better for the data community to have one big ETL company headed (hopefully) towards an IPO rather than two smaller ones stumbling along, hoping Databricks or Snowflake finally decide to acquire them.

they just need to acquire a compute platform…

cool, done. if you send me your personal address i can have it forward to you.

the problem with being a data vendor is you only get to play with the shiny toys you’re building, not everyone else’s. super pumped to be back to being a practitioner soon 😀

i can make an arynn@delphihq.com alias if you want lol

i want them to put max in a racing bull and see what happens

though i’ve been saying this for like a year and a half and clearly been wrong so far. but the gpt-5 launch feels different.

there are non-bearish readings of gpt-5 that may very well be right. but this is the first time the vibes have really shifted.

gartner hype cycle graph with an arrow pointing towards just after the “peak of inflated expectations” on the way down to the “trough of disillusionment”

fyi we are here

lol, mostly because “forward-deployed” implies working with customers, vs “solutions” which doesn’t really mean anything at all

fwiw i started out in a role like this (we called it “Product Operations” at LiveRamp) and it was a great place to start. But we mostly were semi-technical, not CS majors.

isn’t that just a fancy name for what used to be known as “solutions engineers” or “solutions architects” then?

imo FDE is more descriptive, but i don’t think it’s a new thing in terms of the work being done

Cube did a reorganization, which sadly eliminated my role from the company as a solutions engineer in pre-sales.

I am open to work in solutions engineering, devrel, product marketing, and possibly other roles.

DM if you have interest or roles that you could refer me to.

screenshot of polymarket odds on nyc mayor race showing zohran currently at 99.2%

👀

why would you go through the frontend for MCP?

In the cuisine of Mexico City, quesadillas are not assumed to come with cheese unless specifically requested. This is in contrast to the rest of Mexico, where quesadillas are considered to include cheese by definition (quesadilla literally meaning "little cheesy thing" in Spanish).[9] This cultural trend cannot be traced back to a single origin.

learn something new every day

i like to just put the leaves in there and pour through a strainer if needed

a cartoon of two spidermans standing in front of a nypd van Alt: a cartoon of two spidermans standing in front of a nypd van

currently using ai agents to build tests for ai agents

lots of people on LinkedIn etc ragging on dbt Fusion

but from what i can tell, it’s mostly vendors worried that dbt just killed their strategy of reselling dbt core

careful who you listen to out there, folks

> You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service

The elastic license is pretty straightforward; i think dbt would be able to enforce it against the Dagsters of the world if they want to.

I assume they’ll come to some kind of agreement with them & others.

human: so how are we trending this quarter? data: you peaked in 2016

human: why aren’t customers engaging? data: maybe it’s your personality.

chat with your data

not sure about the experimental design here. it seems like the treatment group spent 3 more hours per week learning english and the control group just got… nothing?

i would have liked to see the control be a (non-AI) group tutoring program or something. but still.

This study evaluates the impact of a program leveraging large language models for virtual tutoring in secondary education in Nigeria. Using a randomized controlled trial, the program deployed Microsoft Copilot (powered by GPT-4) to support first-year senior secondary students in English language learning over six weeks. The intervention demonstrated a significant improvement of 0.31 standard deviation on an assessment that included English topics aligned with the Nigerian curriculum, knowledge of artificial intelligence and digital skills. The effect on English, the main outcome of interest, was of 0.23 standard deviations. Cost-effectiveness analysis revealed substantial learning gains, equating to 1.5 to 2 years of ’business-as-usual’ schooling, situating the intervention among some of the most cost-effective programs to improve learning outcomes.

holy effect size, batman documents.worldbank.org/en/publicati...

OpenAI Platform Explore developer resources, tutorials, API docs, and dynamic examples to get the most out of OpenAI's platform.

with openai (and maybe some other model providers) you can use seeds to get mostly deterministic responses

can’t believe jd vance killed the pope and they still elected an american to replace him

probably best option right now is running it alongside cursor and using cursor for just the AI stuff, right?

but idk how well that would work in practice

me heading to r/dataengineering to comment “why not just do this in dbt?” on every post about some insanely over-engineered data pipeline

🤨