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

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• 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.
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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