Join us on September 23rd - 24th in San Francisco

In July, we launched Small Data SF with our friends at Turso and Ollama, and a single day of technical talks and sessions focused on providing a pragmatic lens on the future of data and AI. Thanks to overwhelming interest and support, we have now added a half-day of Workshops to Small Data SF on Monday, September 23rd.

The best part? Workshops are already included in your Small Data SF ticket!

After building together and meeting 250 of your fellow data practitioners and developers, join us on Tuesday, September 24th, for a day of technical talks and strategic sessions with actionable takeaways on building bigger with small data and AI.

It’s time to think small, develop locally, and ship joyfully!

Small Data SF at-a-glance

Small Data SF is a gathering that celebrates and highlights a few core principles:

• We believe in the Simple Joys of Small Data
• More data ≠ better results
• Single machines are Simple and Powerful
• Developing locally Just Works
• Small Data and AI is more valuable than you think

Thanks to the unprecedented interest in this topic, we have been able to build out a robust, exciting agenda for two days of in-person building, learning, and collaboration.

In crafting the agenda, we felt it was important to bring new voices and perspectives to the table. With speakers from Langchain, Buzzfeed, Ollama, Google Gemma, and more, we couldn’t be more excited to bring Small Data SF to life this September!

Here’s what you can expect:

• 8 action-packed, hands-on workshops to build together and create new connections and community - choose up to 2 three-hour topics to build in sessions facilitated by seasoned experts with real-world experience

• 14 technical talks and strategic sessions from leading engineers and founders in data and AI

• An esteemed user panel with leaders from the Enterprise, Public Sector, Consumer, and Tech worlds

• 9 technical demo stations staffed by fellow practitioners ready to answer your questions and debug your thorniest code and queries

• Yummy meals, snacks, a reception, a closing happy hour, and more espresso bars than you’ll know what to do with!

• Killer swag and street cred for kicking off the small data movement in person

• One priceless chance to hear esteemed speakers like Wes McKinney, founder of Posit, Pandas and Apache Arrow, MotherDuck’s own Jordan Tigani, Kathleen Kenealy from Google Gemma, and more speak on the Small Data SF stage and join you throughout the day for follow-up conversations and a closing happy hour.

Check out the full lineup.

Monday, 9/23: Introducing Hands-On Workshops

On Monday, 9/23, we’ll ease into Small Data SF with hands-on workshops and an opportunity to build with incredible technologies like DuckDB, Ollama, Tigris Data, Turso, Quarto, Evidence, Outerbase, Dagster, and Fireworks.ai.

Whether you’re building data apps, working with AI, a data practitioner, or a technical leader, we think you’ll find something that piques your curiosity and leaves you with actionable tips you can bring back to your daily work.

Workshops Overview

Learn more about each workshop.

Special thanks to our Sponsors and our friends at ESSENCE for their support in adding 8 hands-on workshops to Small Data SF.

Tuesday, 9/24: Technical Talks and Sessions

On Tuesday, 9/24, we’ll kick things up a notch with technical talks and strategic sessions by leading engineers and founders. But it’s not just about the sessions - we’ll also have 9 technical demo stations staffed by engineers who are ready to answer your questions and debug your thorniest code and queries. To top it all off, you’ll be well taken care of with delicious breakfast, lunch, snacks, killer swag, and a closing happy hour to continue the conversation directly with the speakers from the day.

Big Data is now Small Data

There has never been an agreed-upon academic definition of Big Data. While we can agree that a few rows in a database may be considered ‘Small Data,’ that’s not really the focus of this event. Now that data of ~10Tb fits on your laptop, shouldn’t we consider that to be Small Data?

The definition of these terms has never been clear, and this gathering won’t change that. Where Small Data SF will have an impact, however, is in our daily work. For far too long, we have assumed that distributed computing is required for data and AI infrastructure in spite of the tremendous advances in hardware capacity.

It’s time for us to right-size our focus and tackle the real areas of opportunity to simplify our work.

Something Small is Happening

Small Data SF is a day for developers and data practitioners to come together and engage in productive community discussions on making the most of ‘small data’ volumes to build useful, meaningful analytics and AI experiences.

Computers are now one hundred times more powerful than when the early hype of the Big Data movement was in full swing. Let’s focus on the underrated joys and untapped potential of using laptops, cloud machines, and edge computing to their full potential to create simple, scalable analytics workflows, applications, and machine learning models.

Will you join us to champion this movement? MotherDuck blog readers get $100 off tickets with code ‘Sheila100’. With only 250 tickets total, once they’re gone, they’re gone.

If you have questions or need additional information as you make your decision, please reach out to events@smalldatasf.com

Special thanks to our friends at Turso and Ollama and our generous sponsors for their support: Cloudflare, dltHub, Evidence, Omni, Outerbase, Posit, and Tigris Data.