Build Your Own Personal Data Repository With Nostalgia

Summary The companies that we entrust our personal data to are using that information to gain extensive insights into our lives and habits while not always making those findings accessible to us. Pascal van Kooten decided that he wanted to have the same capabilities to mine his personal data, so he created the Nostalgia project to integrate his various data sources and query across them. In this episode he shares his motivation for creating the project, how he is using it in his day-to-day, and how he is planning to evolve it in the future. If you’re interested in learning more about yourself and your habits using the personal data that you share with the various services you use then listen now to learn more. Announcements Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. When you’re ready to launch your next app or want to try a project you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so take a look at our friends over at Linode. With 200 Gbit/s private networking, scalable shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40 Gbit/s public network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to scale up. And for your tasks that need fast computation, such as training machine learning models, they just launched dedicated CPU instances. Go to pythonpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with the ways that Python is being used, including the latest in machine learning and data analysis. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Corinium Global Intelligence, ODSC, and Data Council. Upcoming events include the Software Architecture Conference in NYC, Strata Data in San Jose, and PyCon US in Pittsburgh. Go to pythonpodcast.com/conferences to learn more about these and other events, and take advantage of our partner discounts to save money when you register today. Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Pascal van Kooten about his nostalgia project, a nascent framework for taking control of your personal data Interview Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? Can you start by describing your mission with the nostalgia project? How did the topic of personal data management come to be a focus for you? What other options exist for users to be able to collect and manage their own data? What capabilities were lacking in those options that made you feel the need to build Nostalgia? What is your target audience for this set of projects? How are you using Nostalgia in your own life? What are some of the insights that you have been able to gain as a result of integrating your data with Nostalgia? Can you describe the current architecture of the Nostalgia platform and how it has evolved since you began work on it? What are some of the assumptions that you are using to direct the focus of your development and interaction design? What are the minimum number of data sources needed to make this useful? What are some of the challenges that you are facing in collating and integrating different data sources? What are some of the drawbacks of using something like Nostalgia for managing your personal data? What are some of the most interesting/challenging/unexpected aspects of your work on Nostalgia so far? What do you have planned for the future of the project? Keep In Touch Website LinkedIn @kootenpv on Twitter kootenpv on GitHub Picks Tobias Jumanji: The Next Level Jumanji Pascal Bup Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, the Data Engineering Podcast for the latest on modern data management. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email hosts@podcastinit.com) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at pythonpodcast.com/chat Links timeliner qs_ledger Nostalgia Shrynk Whereami R Language Duck Duck Go Caddy Perkeep Dark Programming Language Pandas Podcast Episode Neo4J Pandas Extension Arrays Podcast Episode Parquet Data Engineering Podcast Episode ElectronJS Zincbase The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA