#67 All About Interoperability and Standards in Data Mesh - Interview w/ Samia Rahman

Provided as a free resource by DataStax https://www.datastax.com/products/datastax-astra?utm_source=DataMeshRadio (AstraDB) https://www.patreon.com/datameshradio (Data Mesh Radio Patreon) - get access to interviews well before they are released Transcript for this episode (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z1KdsEVjlKtGNAnp6UvK93Zm3TqTH8Z7MJNv7GY7ptk/edit?usp=sharing (link)) provided by Starburst. See their Data Mesh Summit recordings https://www.starburst.io/learn/events-webinars/datanova-on-demand/?datameshradio (here) and their great data mesh resource center https://www.starburst.io/info/distributed-data-mesh-resource-center/?datameshradio (here) In this episode, Scott interviewed Samia Rahman, Director of Data and AI Strategy and Architecture at life sciences company Seagen. Samia is helping to lead Seagen's early data mesh implementation after helping with two implementations at Thoughtworks since the start of 2019. For Samia, interoperability is about taking information from two systems and combining them to get a higher value. A simple definition but a good one. Two potential key takeaways: 1) don't try to plan too much ahead for developing interoperability standards but definitely keep an eye out for places where you could start to develop those standards. And your standards really, really should evolve - you don't have to nail them right out of the gate. 2) your interoperability will also evolve - you don't need to make every data product interoperable with every other data product and you can start with basic interoperability first. The more you can standardize around unique identifiers, the better, but it's okay to not get it right first thing out of the gate. Samia started her career - and even before in school - focusing on software, especially end-to-end development. A repeating pattern for her has been how crucial contract testing is to getting things into a trustable and scalable state. We've had them in hardware and software for a long time and if you don't have easy testing, those sy