The title is a reference to the Diner Wink skit from I Think You Should Leave.
What I really enjoyed seeing the other day, and finally reading more about, was Netflix's Unified Data Architecture. It is built on the semantics of RDF, which is a specification for reprenting data as triples of "subject", "predicate", "object". Triples compose into "resources" which can be linked to other resources (Netflix uses the term "ontology").
There is a wikipedia article on ontology, which is dense, but rewarding to understand even at a high level.
The reason I enjoyed seeing this post is a simple fact: triple-based systems are entering the mainstream, making their adoption more likely in the coming years.
It seems that when large companies with visible and respected engineering publications (i.e. blogs) publish on concepts like RDF and applied at scale, the larget industry notices. And at the very least, companies are willing to consider another way, rather than the "just use Postgres" dogma which has plagued the last couple years of engineering culture.
Here's to the future of data systems! 🍻