Conner Howell
R. Conner Howell is a software engineer at Eventual, Inc. where he works on Daft SQL. Prior to Eventual, he worked at Amazon on AWS CloudWatch Logs Insights and Amazon PartiQL – an open source SQL dialect for semi-structured data. His work interests include SQL, PL, and DBMS architectures. He is based in Seattle and enjoys cycling, climbing, and skiing the many mountains of the Pacific Northwest & BC.
Session
11-08
10:10
45min
Why Models Break Your Pipelines (and How to Make Them First-Class Citizens)
Conner Howell
Most AI pipelines still treat models like Python UDFs, just another function bolted onto Spark, Pandas, or Ray. But models aren’t functions: they’re expensive, stateful, and unreliable. In this talk, we’ll explore why this mental model breaks at scale and share practical patterns for treating models as first-class citizens in your pipelines.
Talk Track 1