Data Gibberish

You are stuck because you are optimizing for the wrong thing. Most data professionals I talk to work incredibly hard at their craft. They go deep on Python, on dbt, on Spark, on whatever the stack is. They take courses, they build side projects, they read documentation on weekends. And then they watch someone else get promoted. Someone who, honestly, is probably less technically sharp than them. I...

I had a great chat with Nick Valiotti . Nick built his fractional CDO practice around one bet: growing companies need senior data leadership long before most of them can afford it full time . He wrote the playbook down in his book Your Fractional CDO, after watching the same failure pattern repeat across years of client work. A data team builds perfectly modeled tables, clean naming conventions, a...

Presenting Peter Mukherjee Peter built a London business from scratch in 1992, grew it into an international franchise network with a public listing, and lost most of it to the 2008 crash. He reinvented himself as a professional architectural photographer and worked at it for fifteen years before retiring in 2023 to write full-time. I’ve known Peter Mukherjee for about an year now, and he’s one of...

Presenting Yuki Kakegawa Yuki is a Staff Data Engineer, author of the Polars Cookbook, and the founder of Orem Data. He writes about data tools and independent consulting on Substack and LinkedIn. I asked Yuki , Staff Data Engineer and author of the Polars Cookbook, what the biggest adjustment was when he became a team of one. He skipped tooling. He skipped workload. He said this: It’s a shift in...

Presenting Prajakta Yerpude Prajakta spent a decade climbing every rung of the data engineering ladder, intern, engineer, senior, lead, manager, and somewhere along the way realized her biggest impact was no longer in the code she wrote but in the people she unblocked. Getting promoted into management felt like winning. I had the title, the 1:1s, the org chart with my name at the top. What nobody...

I had a chat with Mihail , a software engineering lead who also lectures at Plovdiv University. He teaches data engineering as an elective because the core CS curriculum has zero room for it. That tells you everything about the state of data education. Universities produce graduates who know SQL syntax, basic normalization, and enough theory to pass an exam. Then those graduates walk into jobs whe...

I invited Yana G.Y. to a live conversation because she does something rare. She has a director title and a Substack generating between $5K and $10K a month on the side of her full-time banking job. And she runs it entirely on data. Data-driven the way subscription businesses actually operate it. Numbers connected to decisions, decisions connected to outcomes. Below are the ideas she shared. The fu...

Most data professionals are really good at one thing. They know their domain, they know their tools, and they go deep. That depth is how you get hired. It is also how you get stuck. The further you go in your career, the more you run into problems that don’t live inside a single domain. A pipeline that nobody uses because the data model underneath it was wrong. A dashboard that answers the wrong q...

Seniority is a quiet death of the ego that thinks a perfect pull request solves the business problem. In this conversation, Erfan Hesami and I dismantle the myth that technical depth is the only path to the top. You spend years mastering Python and SQL only to reach a level where pipelines fail because requirements were wrong or stakeholders changed their minds. This is the ceiling where most data...

Alejandro Aboy and I sat down to talk about the mess of modern AI. He told me he feels like an octopus lately. He spent years mastering dbt and Airflow. Now his day involves managing agent protocols and context windows. The problem is that AI agents are the most demanding stakeholders you have ever had. They have zero intuition. They do not understand your tribal knowledge or your hidden business...

The session centers on a fundamental problem: You and I are trained as engineers to use design patterns for code, but we’re often left winging it when it comes to people and organizational complexity. Michał Poczwardowski argues that we need to treat our thinking process with the same level of structural integrity we give our architecture. Mental Models are Just Design Patterns for Your Brain Mich...