Author: Kevin Feasel

Kevin Feasel is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and CTO at Envizage, where he specializes in data analytics with T-SQL and R, forcing Spark clusters to do his bidding, fighting with Kafka, and pulling rabbits out of hats on demand. He is the lead contributor to Curated SQL (https://curatedsql.com) and author of PolyBase Revealed (https://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484254608). A resident of Durham, North Carolina, he can be found cycling the trails along the triangle whenever the weather's nice enough.

Shop Talk: 2026-06-01

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June 8, 2026

2:57 pm

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Show Notes

The Recording

The Panelists

  • Kevin Feasel

Notes: Questions and Topics

Raleigh Day of Data 2026 Recap

Our first topic of the night was a recap of this year’s Raleigh Day of Data. We talked a bit about how the event went and our lessons learned. The biggest lesson learned was, don’t schedule a conference on Memorial Day weekend.

Language Models and Malicious Helpfulness

Our next topic came from Ars Technica, which reported on Meta’s support chatbot being so friendly that it would allow random people to change the e-mail address associated with Instagram accounts. Along the way, I spent a good bit of time covering different services for rooting out likely LLM-based writing. My favorite at this point is GPTZero.me, which is designed more for educators but it does a good job of determining if long-form text comes from a human or a bot.

Day of Data Badge Generator

The final topic of the evening was my discussion of the Day of Data Badge Generator, a simple application I threw together (with the significant help of Claude Code). Its purpose is to make it quick and easy to check in a person at a Day of Data-style event and print out a thermal label that you can affix to a placard or badge holder. My favorite such placard, by the way, is a set of dry erase index cards. They’re about 20 times cheaper than custom badges, and much more durable than cardstock. For a free conference, I think they do a really good job, even if they required people to think hard in the morning about which color to choose.