#44: Beyond the Pipeline: A Smarter Paradigm for Data Engineering

Hello DDDers,

Just before the easter break, it's time to practice our data engineering chops! Let's welcome Theodore Pantazopoulos on stage, where he shall present his work on avoiding infrastructure traps and finding better ways to think about data and building leaner systems that scale.

Stick around after the talk - not just for pizza, beers, and networking, but also because two lucky participants will win tickets for the upcoming Devoxx conference, that takes place at the end of April, and features a stellar speaker lineup. We also have some announcements for the next meetup, where we will celebrate the 10th anniversary of this community!

Talk: Beyond the Pipeline: A Smarter Paradigm for Data Engineering

For decades, the default response to every data challenge was the same: add more infrastructure. More servers, more pipelines, more complexity. This talk challenges that assumption.

We'll explore how a fundamental shift in thinking, treating data producers as partners in a contract rather than passive sources to be queried, can eliminate entire layers of engineering overhead, reduce costs, and simplify architectures that have grown unnecessarily complex.

This paradigm proves especially powerful in constrained resource environments, whether that means teams and organizations that cannot afford over-engineered pipelines or expensive clusters, or architectures that are constrained by design, such as microcontrollers, embedded systems, and edge devices where compute and memory are fundamentally limited.

Speaker bio

Theodore has been shipping data infrastructure that actually scales. As a Principal Engineer, creator of the open-source streaming-sql-engine, and contributor to numerous open-source projects, he's built large-scale data processing systems that power core products and drive business decisions. With experience across global corporations, high-growth startups, and industry leaders such as Citrix, Delivery Hero, and shopflix, and deep expertise in Go, Python, and data engineering, he specializes in turning complex data challenges into reliable, high-impact solutions.

Meetup Outline
18:30 - 18:45 Warm welcome
18:45 - 19:45 Talk by Theodore
19:45 - 20:00 Devoxx ticket giveaway
20:00+ Networking & Discussions

Sponsors

XM is kindly hosting the event on their premises, which are located only 5' on foot from Megaron Athens.

XM (https://www.xm.com/) is an award winning online trading broker firm that serves clients from over 190 countries on 5 continents. It is now an established fintech organisation with core capability of software, platforms and product development.

All the best,
DDDGreece meetup team.