Meet Meet Kamesh Sampath, Lead Developer Advocate at Snowflake

Kamesh is a veteran tech innovator with 20 years in the trenches. As an author and developer advocate, he's on a mission to demystify data and cloud technologies. His passion? Empowering developers to push boundaries and create the impossible. With a track record of crafting enterprise solutions across diverse industries, he brings battle-tested insights to the dev community.

In this episode, we explored a crucial element of hackathons: judging. Kamesh Sampath has developed a comprehensive framework for evaluating hackathon demos and presentations. His approach includes several key components: understanding the problem being addressed, researching existing solutions to see what has already been tried, and scrutinizing the proposed solution’s architecture to ensure it meets the essential requirements. Additionally, his framework involves examining the technology stack used, the methods for deploying the solution, and the authenticity of the code. Kamesh also focuses heavily on the team’s thought process, the rationale behind their proposed solution, and their ability to handle questions during their presentations.

Additionally, we discussed what typically slows down development velocity. According to Kamesh, mastering the right tools, automating what you can, minimizing distractions, iterating from an MVP, and maintaining composure are key to increasing development speed. When it comes to writing better code faster with AI, the most crucial skill is knowing how to ask the right questions in the right way.

Useful Links

For more insights on what Snowflake is doing with DevOps for data to increase development velocity, check out these resources:

Video on Snowflake and DevOps
Snowflake’s Approach to Data Velocity

Related blog posts:

Announcing General Availability for Snowflake REST & Python Control Plane APIs
Snowflake CLI Now Generally Available

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