The Art of Using Open Source to Open New Data Doors with the Co-Founders of OpenMetadata
Hashmap on Tap Ep. 109
Reality is always chaotic, and as technologists, we need to handle these complexities.
— Suresh Srinivas, Co-Founder of OpenMetadata
On a recent episode of Hashmap on Tap, Kelly Kohlleffel is joined by two guests, Suresh Srinivas and Harsha Chintalapani. Suresh and Harsha are the co-founders of OpenMetadata — an open-source project that aims to define specifications to standardize metadata. Prior to founding OpenMetadata, Suresh and Harsha were colleagues with Kelly at Hortonworks before moving on to roles at Uber.
This episode doesn’t just feature double the guests, it also has double the beverages on tap: coffee and tea. Suresh and Kelly are both drinking a variation of ginger tea — Suresh’s cup of choice (that he enjoys six times a day!) is Indian ginger tea that’s served extra hot, and for Kelly, ginger peach tea with ginger honey. Harsha, an avid coffee drinker, sips on his third cup of the day.
Over the course of the episode, Suresh and Harsha detail how the OpenMetadata project is using a schema-first approach with a centralized metadata store, that integrates with popular systems and services in the data stack, to collect, store, and index metadata through an API and an open-source web UI. Additionally, they each share how their background in building distributed, open-source data systems on Hadoop at Yahoo and their time together at Hortonworks led to the decision to begin the OpenMetadata project.
Curious to learn more about their thoughts on today’s data landscape and how metadata can open new doors? Grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and get to listening!
Hear Suresh and Harsha’s perspectives on:
- The importance of acknowledging the end user’s experience to make data easier to use and increase productivity
- Their passion for open-source and what it’s like to work on a variety of large-scale projects
- How the game Space Invaders got Harsha interested in computers and programming
- Whether or not data companies have more data maturity and if they have similar struggles to (non-data) product companies
- Suresh’s opinion that “architectures are only clean in Powerpoint”
- OpenMetadata — the idea that led to its creation and why they’re in the game to create a centralized metadata system to simplify the future of data architecture
- Why Kelly and Suresh recommend using Superhuman
- P.S. You can join OpenMetadata on Slack here and check them out on Github
Listen to the episode:
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