Mark Wheeler

marketing stuff @astronomerio

previously: cmo @viamrobotics, head flack for @mongodb, @unqork. this is my only twitter account.

[Mark Wheeler @Marky_At_Work]

i have never posted the rocket ship emoji

[Astronomer @astronomerio]

"The pressure that using Astronomer took off our cloud infrastructure team was immense. I consider Astronomer one of the non-negotiables." — Bill Dunaway, Senior Director of Data Engineering and Operations, @ClaycoInc

🏗️ Clayco is a $7.5B design-build firm with 50-100 active job sites at any given time. Their data engineering team knew exactly what they needed: reliable orchestration that didn't require them to become cloud infrastructure experts to maintain it.

Clayco chose Astro. In under 90 days, the team consolidated 4 legacy schedulers into a single platform. ERP syncs went from an hour to 15 minutes. Dag count grew 20x in the first year.

Case study link below.

[Astronomer @astronomerio]

✍️ Carter Page, EVP of R&D at Astronomer, writes in @CIOonline about why so many early AI initiatives are struggling, not because models are weak, but because the context they need to operate reliably inside organizations is missing.

💭 "Orchestration is typically the one layer that already has visibility across platforms, spanning your warehouse, your transformation layer, your external APIs, and your operational databases. That cross-platform vantage point is what makes it possible to build a context layer that is comprehensive rather than siloed."

Read the article for Carter's advice on the 2️⃣ key investments that organizations deploying AI agents at scale need to make, before their agents reach production.

[Lois Uttley @LoisUttley]

I was sitting on our Morningside Heights roofdeck with my camera when suddenly this American Kestrel flew by, practically at eye level. It made a quick turn and stared right at me before flying off. What a view of its gorgeous feathers in flight! #birdcpp

[Manhattan Bird Alert @BirdCentralPark]

A rare American Bittern rests on Duck Island on Central Park's Harlem Meer today.

[Astronomer @astronomerio]

A two-task plugin routing Slack pipeline that alerts to predefined commands or an AI token.

Samantha Blaney Cuevas of @JeppForeFlight shares on building the Data Port agent in Airflow.

Links below.

#AI #Automation #Airflow

[Mark Wheeler @Marky_At_Work]

👋

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

Today you all need to see how the earth toad spins and twirls while burying itself in the ground. 😂

[Noel Y. Calingasan • NYC @nyclovesnyc]

The Kwanzan cherry blossoms are now in full bloom in Central Park’s Bridle Path west of the reservoir in New York City

Filmed today, April 15, 2026

[Astronomer @astronomerio]

@mattsimontacchi has joined our team as President of Field Operations, after spending nearly two decades in field leadership roles at @RedHat.

Throughout his tenure at Red Hat, Matt was at the forefront of translating emerging open-source innovation into enterprise adoption. He played a pivotal role in building the field organization and customer engagement models that helped technologies like Linux and Kubernetes evolve from developer-driven projects into foundational elements of global infrastructure.

"What I learned at Red Hat is that when an open-source community earns the trust of the world’s best engineering teams, something powerful happens. I saw it with Linux, JBoss, and Kubernetes, and the playbook for bringing that value to the enterprise is changing fast. AI is rewriting how companies build, deploy, and operate software. The opportunity at Astronomer is to take what I know about scaling enterprise field organizations and adapt it for a world where reliable, governed data pipelines are the bridge to the enterprise context that makes agentic AI work at scale. Airflow already has that trust, and now our task is to help organizations turn it into their competitive advantage." – Matt Simontacchi, President of Field Operations, Astronomer

Link to the press release: https://t.co/0mHoqF4ULh

[Manhattan Bird Alert @BirdCentralPark]

An Osprey stopped by Central Park's Harlem Meer and within two minutes was on its way with a bullhead catfish to go.

[Astronomer @astronomerio]

🎸 "Astronomer is moving from being a tool for data engineers, to a place where the entire organization will rely on the service to power the data we need." - Miko Chen, Lead Data Engineer, @createmusic

Miko spoke with @diginomica about how Create Music Group, one of the fastest-growing names in music tech, uses Astro to orchestrate 600+ data pipelines and deliver real-time insights for music artists globally.

📰 Read the article: https://t.co/FIIWVsxt3x

[Astronomer @astronomerio]

Most text-to-SQL fails at scale. Not because of the LLM — because of context.

We built Kepler, our internal AI data assistant, around one insight: the hard problem isn't SQL generation. It's discovery.

Context layer over warehouse metadata + Airflow lineage. Hybrid search (keyword + semantic + usage-based boosting via RRF). A discovery subagent that finds the right tables before the main agent writes a line of SQL. Playbooks that institutionalize what worked.

A third of Astronomer uses it. 3.5K queries answered in a few months. Powered by the data foundation Astro makes possible.

Full writeup on our engineering blog → https://t.co/icESYSCfwT

[Lois Uttley @LoisUttley]

I stood in the rain this morning to capture this tender moment between two ravens nesting at a famous uptown Manhattan cathedral. The female has been on the nest for days and was calling loudly for her mate before he flew in. #birdcpp

[Daniel Katzive @dannykatzive]

Six #baldeagles held a morning staff meeting on an ice flow on the Hudson River off 72nd Street this morning. Eagles like to follow the ice, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen six together before. Must have been something big going on. @BirdCentralPark

[Astronomer @astronomerio]

🏆 Congratulations to the winners of our annual customer awards program, the Astronomer Data Excellence Awards!

The Astronomer Data Excellence Awards recognize the innovative projects and talented individuals who are redefining what's possible with orchestration using Apache Airflow.

Innovator of the Year - @lyft
EMEA Innovator of the Year - NewDay
Outstanding Customer-Facing AI Use Case - @NotionHQ
Excellence in AI-Enabled Data Engineering - @ao
Operational Excellence Award - @MolocoHQ
Data Observability Excellence Award - @bookingcom
Data-at-Scale Achievement - @wix
Data Engineering for Good Award - @CarnegieMellon

Learn more about the winners: https://t.co/awuSzn5tun

[Astronomer @astronomerio]

❓ We asked 5,800+ data engineers how they're using Airflow. Find out what they had to say.

Join us on February 5 to learn:

→ Latest trends in how teams are using Airflow today
→ Emerging use cases from the annual Airflow survey
→ How to make the most of Airflow for data orchestration in 2026

📋 Register: https://t.co/bncVThlIFg

[Above_96th @Above96th]

Our resident Great Blue Heron has been weathering the blizzard with aplomb. I spotted it knee-deep in snow in Central Park's Loch during the height of the storm. 💙🩶💙 #Herons #CentralPark #birdcpp

[Astronomer @astronomerio]

👷‍♀️ "Astronomer instantly became the conductor of our data orchestra, pulling all the moving parts together and keeping them in sync. Without it, we would’ve had a lot of noise and very little music. With it, suddenly the whole show made sense. Honestly, it feels less like just another tool and more like the puppeteer making sure the entire act doesn’t collapse on stage.” - Chris Hidding, Head of Digital, @WesTrac_Cat

Read the new case study to learn why WesTrac, Australia's largest authorized Caterpillar dealer and among the largest globally, chose Astro over other options like dbt Cloud and OSS Apache Airflow to keep its data environment in sync:

https://t.co/71EVi60Wln

[Astronomer @astronomerio]

Thank you for your interest in Astronomer.

[Manhattan Bird Alert @BirdCentralPark]

The Wood Duck flaps his wings on the Central Park Reservoir.

[IEEE Spectrum @IEEESpectrum]

“It was amazing that we managed to ‘rebuild the plane while flying it’ when we worked on Airflow 3." https://t.co/705vGpqiv5