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Plain-English agents, not hype: plan, use tools, add guardrails—then dry-run a calendar + inbox agent that saves hours. You’ve heard “AI agent” everywhere, but definitions vary. In this episode, Mukundan explains—in plain, practical language—what a real agent is and when to use one. We’ll contrast agents with chatbots and simple automations, walk through the five pillars (goal, plan, tools, memory, feedback), and strip the tooling of buzzwords. Then we run a live dry-run: two 90-minute deep-work blocks, one 45-minute admin sweep, and a 30-minute workout that avoids your existing commitments. We finish by triaging sample emails into reply/delegate/archive/read-later and drafting five concise replies with one clear next step each. Safety first: drafts-only, tentative calendar holds, approval gates, and fallbacks if tools fail. Copy the templates from the show notes and ship your v0.5 tonight. Lightning Round: True/False (answers in the episode) An AI agent is just a chatbot.Remove a tool and it still makes progress → probably a real agent.Clear success criteria matter less than good prompts.Chatbots reply; agents execute across steps.Fixed automations are best when inputs rarely change.If a tool disconnect breaks everything, it’s a brittle macro.Links & Resources AI Agent Copy-Paste Templates (run these in ChatGPT): Get your free copyRecording Partner: Riverside → Sign up here (affiliate)Host Your Podcast: RSS.com (affiliate )Research Tools: Sider.ai (affiliate)Join the Newsletter: Free Email Newsletter to receive practical AI tools weekly.Join the Discussion (comments hub): https://mukundansankar.substack.com/notes🔗 Connect with Me:Website: Data & AI with MukundanTwitter/X: @sankarmukund475LinkedIn: Mukundan SankarYouTube: Subscribe

The Dry Run

Date: 29.07.2025

Time: 19:00 - 22:00

Location: Artzzz Studio - Kunstgalerie Berlin

Get your free ticket here: Ticket for event (20 tickets available)

Ever wondered how TED speakers, conference presenters, or meetup hosts got so good at explaining complex topics?

3 words: practice, practice, practice.

Ideally, in front of people who provide specific feedback on what worked well - and what didn’t.

Especially for students and young professionals those opportunities may be rare.

I want to create a safe space for people who would like to practice and improve their presentation skills. Who would like to learn to convey complex ideas in a simple way. Who not just aim to talk and inform, but who strive to inspire and motivate.

At The Dry Run you can expect:

• 3 speakers testing their presentations for the very first time in front of a live audience - so be prepared for the imperfection!
• 3 Running Buddies: experts in presentation and public speaking - they will provide constructive feedback to the speakers after their presentations (not in front of the audience)
• Networking: connect with like-minded people and build a supportive network in a cozy environment
• Exceptional cocktails - with or without alcohol (available for purchase separately)

Attendance is free!

Get your free ticket here: Ticket for event (20 tickets available)

To help make this event possible, you’re welcome to support it with a donation at the end.

You are a student, career starter or young professional in a technical field looking to become more confident speaking in front of others?

Fill out this form to apply as a presenter: Application Form

I’ll get in touch to guide you through the next steps.

FLINTA* are especially encouraged to apply.

Andrew Atkinson works hands on with Ruby on Rails and Postgres performance. He even wrote a book about it. Andrew is gearing up to present a talk at Railsconf next month about performance mistakes and he’s going to dry run his in-person talk with us. Andrew’s talk is aimed at developers working with Rails and ActiveRecord ORM - but the topics are evergreen for all developers working with Postgres.

This will be a chance to learn about Postgres performance and offer Andrew feedback for his in person talk. We’ll have a 30 minute talk from Andrew that kicks off at the top of the hour and then time for group discussion about the performance topics. We’d love to have you join us.

For the dag owner, testing Airflow DAGs can be complicated and tedious. Kubectl cp your dag from local to pod, exec into the pod, and run a command? Install breeze? Why pull the Airflow image and start up the webserver / scheduler / triggerer if all we want is to test the addition of a new task? It doesn’t have to be this hard. At Etsy, we’ve simplified testing dags for the dag owner with dagtest. Dagtest is a Python package that we house on our internal PyPi. It is a small client binary that makes HTTP requests to a test API. The test API is a simple Flask server that receives these requests and builds pods to run airflow dags backfill commands based on the options provided via dagtest. The simplest of these is a dry-run. Typically, users run test runs where the dag executes E2E for a single ds. Equally important is the environment setup. We use an adhoc Airflow instance in a separate GCP environment with an SA that cannot write to Production buckets. This talk will discuss both.

Summary

Business intelligence is a necessity for any organization that wants to be able to make informed decisions based on the data that they collect. Unfortunately, it is common for different portions of the business to build their reports with different assumptions, leading to conflicting views and poor choices. Looker is a modern tool for building and sharing reports that makes it easy to get everyone on the same page. In this episode Daniel Mintz explains how the product is architected, the features that make it easy for any business user to access and explore their reports, and how you can use it for your organization today.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to run a bullet-proof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Daniel Mintz about Looker, a a modern data platform that can serve the data needs of an entire company

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing what Looker is and the problem that it is aiming to solve?

How do you define business intelligence?

How is Looker unique from other approaches to business intelligence in the enterprise?

How does it compare to open source platforms for BI?

Can you describe the technical infrastructure that supports Looker? Given that you are connecting to the customer’s data store, how do you ensure sufficient security? For someone who is using Looker, what does their workflow look like?

How does that change for different user roles (e.g. data engineer vs sales management)

What are the scaling factors for Looker, both in terms of volume of data for reporting from, and for user concurrency? What are the most challenging aspects of building a business intelligence tool and company in the modern data ecosystem?

What are the portions of the Looker architecture that you would do differently if you were to start over today?

What are some of the most interesting or unusual uses of Looker that you have seen? What is in store for the future of Looker?

Contact Info

LinkedIn

Parting Question

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

Links

Looker Upworthy MoveOn.org LookML SQL Business Intelligence Data Warehouse Linux Hadoop BigQuery Snowflake Redshift DB2 PostGres ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) Airflow Luigi NiFi Data Curation Episode Presto Hive Athena DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) Looker Action Hub Salesforce Marketo Twilio Netscape Navigator Dynamic Pricing Survival Analysis DevOps BigQuery ML Snowflake Data Sharehouse

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

Used by millions worldwide, FileMaker Pro is an award-winning database program for managing people, projects, images, assets, and other information. It's easy to use and totally customizable--so long as you know what you're doing. But FileMaker Pro doesn't come with a printed manual, so FileMaker Pro: The Missing Manual is the authoritative, jargon-free book that should have been in the box. FileMaker Pro: The Missing Manual approaches FileMaker the way FileMaker approaches you: it's user-friendly and seemingly straightforward enough, but it offers plenty of substance worthy of deeper exploration. Packed with practical information as well as countless expert tips and invaluable guidance, it's an in-depth guide to designing and building useful databases with the powerful and pliable FileMaker Pro. Covering FileMaker for both Windows and Macintosh, FileMaker Pro: The Missing Manual is ideal for small business users, home users, school teachers, developers--anyone who wants to organize information efficiently and effectively. Whether you want to run a business, publish a shopping cart on the Web, plan a wedding, manage a student information system at your school, or program databases for clients, this book delivers. Author Geoff Coffey has many years of experience using FileMaker Pro (he was, in fact, an early beta tester for the product). Author Susan Prosser is a FileMaker Certified Developer who trains other developers. Together, Coffey and Prosser show you how to: Get FileMaker up and running quickly and smoothly Import and organize information with ease Design relational databases that are simple to use, yet powerful Take advantage of FileMaker Pro calculation capabilities Automate processes with scripting Customize FileMaker Pro to your needs and preferences Share information with other people (coworkers, clients, and customers) and other programs Understand and select the best security options What could easily come across as dry and intimidating--things like relational theory, calculations, and scripting--are presented in a way that is interesting and intuitive to mainstream users. In no time, you'll be working more productively and efficiently using FileMaker Pro.