One of the growing startups behind the 2021st edition of Pi Day Coding Competition is Askdata, a next-gen analytics platform that helps teams get a friction-less data experience that is x10 more personal, collaborative, and fast. “Teams around the world use our technology to quickly generate value from their data. We give users the ability to answer any data-related questions with a simple search in natural language” tells Simone Di Somma, CEO of the startup and one of the mentors you will meet at our coding competition. Askdata is one of the few Italian startups that went through the acceleration process of Y Combinator, the best startup accelerator in the world. “I think they invested in us because we’re building a modern Rosetta stone to allow people to interact with data using natural language. We’ve developed the world’s largest repository of human and technical queries. It is two times bigger than the second greatest know repository, managed by Salesforce“.
What’s the most interesting thing you, as a developer, learned working at Askdata?
At the very beginning, we were developing tons of features. Pretty soon, fortunately, we realized that the right features generate value for the users, not the number of features. I learned that prioritizing features is the key to unlock value and engagement.
What are the main technologies you use at Askdata?
We have three macro-areas of development: front end, back end, and artificial intelligence. For the front end, we use AngularJS. When it comes to the back end, it’s Java, because of its solidity: it allows you to build things that will work forever. Then we have the AI component: we work a lot with transformer language models and deep neural networks. We use mostly exclusively TensorFlow and PyTorch.
What are the other technologies you use and what do you use them for?
Well, when it comes to data science, Python is mostly a standard. What else? For NoSQL we prefer Mongo and Elastic, tools that are production-ready with no vendor lock-in. We use Kafka to manage our events system because it allows asynchronous works among different services. Finally, we have Apache Spark for big data, since we don’t want to be limited in the number of data we can manage.
Describe the developers working at Askdata and tell us what are you looking for.
Humble, curious, and contributors in two directions: internal, with the people of our team, and toward customers. In my carrier, I discovered that these are three characteristics difficult to find all together in one person. Humbles always question themselves and that puts them in a condition of always learning something new. Curiosity is the key element that put you in search of something new and enables you to innovate. Being a contributor means you are not satisfied with just doing your tasks, but you are ready to help teammates and clients when they are in trouble. We are currently looking for front-end and mobile developers, but we are growing very fast and we are eager for talent with the profile I outlined.
