Anil Thapa writes about data platforms, agentic systems, and leading data teams, lessons drawn from fifteen-plus years of building and running them.https://anilthapa.com/en-ushttps://anilthapa.com/writing/posts/the-tools-i-use/https://anilthapa.com/writing/posts/the-tools-i-use/The current working set, kept alongside the 2025 list rather than edited over it. The gap between the two is the interesting part: the core barely moved, a compliance tool became a runtime dependency, and a third of the list stopped being data tooling at all.Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTarchitecturetoolsstackworkflowhttps://anilthapa.com/writing/posts/what-bi-means-revisited/https://anilthapa.com/writing/posts/what-bi-means-revisited/I defined business intelligence in 2021, revisited it in 2024, and I'm revisiting it again. What changed, what didn't, and which of my own definitions aged worst.Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTdata-in-the-businessbistrategytrusthttps://anilthapa.com/writing/posts/agents-against-a-real-warehouse/https://anilthapa.com/writing/posts/agents-against-a-real-warehouse/The demo works because the schema is clean. Production schemas carry a decade of history, four competing definitions of "customer," and users who withdraw trust permanently the first time they get a confidently wrong number.Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-systemsllmagentsdata-platformhttps://anilthapa.com/writing/posts/catalog-discovery-observability-governance/https://anilthapa.com/writing/posts/catalog-discovery-observability-governance/Four words used interchangeably that mean four different things, and what actually stops pipelines breaking. Written in 2024, and the part that changed once the thing querying the warehouse stopped being a person.Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTtrust-and-governancegovernancecatalogmetadataagentshttps://anilthapa.com/writing/posts/who-owns-the-model/https://anilthapa.com/writing/posts/who-owns-the-model/Moving data model ownership from engineers to analysts looked like a tooling change. It was a governance change wearing a tooling costume, and the ownership question got quietly promoted once systems started answering.Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTleading-data-teamsdbtownershipgovernanceanalytics-engineeringhttps://anilthapa.com/writing/posts/actionable-dashboards/https://anilthapa.com/writing/posts/actionable-dashboards/Most dashboards get built, launched, and ignored. Treating that as the default outcome rather than a failure case changes what you build, and what you decide not to.Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTdata-in-the-businessdashboardsadoptionbi