What I write about, roughly twice a month: the organizational half of data as much as the technical half. No beginner tutorials; a model answers those faster than I can.
What actually happens when you put agents and LLMs to work inside a real data organization, and what the demos leave out.
BrowseHiring, structure, capacity and the stakeholder work nobody puts on a roadmap. Building a function, not just a backlog.
BrowseExecutive partnership, strategy, and the difference between reporting on decisions and being present while they are made.
BrowseQuality, definitions, lineage and incidents. Why trust is a step function and how to keep it on the right side of the step.
BrowsePlatform decisions with the reasoning shown, including what they cost to run and the tradeoffs I accepted.
BrowseThe 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.
Read the postI 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.
Read the postThe 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.
Read the postFour 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.
Read the postMoving 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.
Read the postMost 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.
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