I must confess, while the grad school parts resonated for me, the part that was most engaging was the vein of applied provenance tools.

Having recently left my program (but enjoying research), I've actually been spending a huge amount of time planning out and slowly executing building a better tool chain for data analysis, and one of the really exciting details that has popped out of my design is a very nIce support for incremental computation and computational provenance, while having all of the constituent parts be libraries (rather than needing to mod a run time)

Point being I was really intrigued to see the thinking behind other folks getting drawn into that space