Data Renegades Ep. #3, Building Tools That Shape Data with Maxime Beauchemin
Nov 25, 2025
In this engaging conversation, guest Maxime Beauchemin, the creator of Apache Airflow and Superset, shares his journey from building data warehouses at Ubisoft to revolutionizing data tooling. He reveals the inspiration behind Airflow, the challenges of scalable BI, and his mission with Preset to disrupt conventional analytics. Maxime discusses the implications of AI on data practices, the future of data roles, and the importance of open-source governance in fostering healthy data teams. A treasure trove of insights for data enthusiasts!
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Airflow Began As An Internal Pipeline Rewrite
- Maxime built Airflow at Airbnb after asking to recreate Facebook's internal Data Swarm capabilities as a pipeline-as-code tool.
- He productionized Airflow within months while running two subject areas and iterating with early internal users.
Superset Was Born In A Hackathon
- Superset started as a three-day hackathon project to query Druid and Presto because Tableau licenses and extracts didn't scale.
- That quick prototype grew into the full open-source Superset project.
Right Abstraction Beats Complexity
- Airflow hit the right abstraction at the right time: DAGs as a "smart cron" solved many pipeline needs.
- He believes heavier structure might have been premature then, making simplicity key to adoption.
