Religious Entrepreneurship in Nevil Shute’s Round the Bend
September 8, 2021 § Leave a comment
I am currently podcasting a book club with my father on Nevil Shute‘s novel Round the Bend. The framing question we are using for our discussions is “What is this book about?” There are a number of different themes that have come up (e.g., technology, love, and racism), but my current hypothesis is that the book is primarily about “Religious Entrepreneurship”, a sort of cousin to the Spiritual Entrepreneurship I studied with Hatchery LA.
Here (four chapters in) is how and why I think the author wrote this book. This is all purely hypothetical on my part; I have not done any actual research on his methods. However, this reflects the kind of process that I could see myself going through, based on comments the author made about the context in which the protagonist built his business.
« Read the rest of this entry »The Reporting Control Center
September 5, 2021 § Leave a comment
aka Quilt Data Hub or Lightdash 2.0?
Challenge
Can I evangelize
a corporate data platform
by just emailing out reports
with sufficiently smart URLs?
Rationale
I don’t have the power
to pull others onto a new platform.
But I can push useful data to others
in a way that inspires them to participate more directly with the platform
Proposal
Replace friendly Salesforce Reports and powerful NetSuite Saved Searches with a unified interface for viewing, editing, sharing, and managing:
- versioned reports
- personalized alerts
- variant analyses
that are delivered via self-contained emails that also onboard people into greater use of the platform
Definitions
Friendly
- Browseable
- Drag and Drop
- Live previews
Powerful
- Complex formulas
- Scaleable notifications
- Easy joins and relabeling
Motivation
The main value of Quilt to my business
is as a point of leverage
to shift the culture of communication
from “zombie data” in tables
to “smart reports” in a repository
The Coherency Manifesto: Towards Communal Data Platforms
August 21, 2021 § Leave a comment
Version 1.0: Sep 11, 2021 (Interdependence Day)
As a community
who produces, consumes, and manages data
we hold these truths to be self-evident:
Psycho-Analytic Engineering (Coalesce 2021)
June 6, 2021 § Leave a comment
Using Data to Differentiate Our Selves
Keynote Talk Proposal for Coalesce 2021
Based on “DBT as Organizational Therapy“
« Read the rest of this entry »DBT as the “Couch” for Organizational Therapy
May 13, 2021 § 1 Comment
Or, “How ELTT is the Key to World Peace”
Draft Submission Script for Coalesce 2021 « Read the rest of this entry »
Configuring DataBricks on AWS
May 5, 2021 § Leave a comment
Despite the excellent QuickStart tools, this was way harder than I thought. For some reason I had the worst difficulty creating a Workspace on AWS for Databricks.
Here are some tips that might help others who get stuck.
« Read the rest of this entry »SyncHouse: MVC for Enterprise SaaS
May 2, 2021 § Leave a comment
A concrete proposal for Imagining a Data Resort as enforcing a Model-View-Controller architecture across multiple Software-as-a-Service applications. The key is replacing transient enterprise data integrations with a persistent “sync house,” and making that the one full-service Source of Truth for data, schemas, and business logic.
- Ingest data from Salesforce, NetSuite, etc. (e.g.,
Stitch/Talend, FiveTran) - Store raw data in a LakeHouse (e.g., Databricks, Delta Lake; or just Redshift)
- Aka “ELT vs ETL“
- Manage schemas via dbt (e.g., dbt Cloud)
- View and report on appropriate data (e.g., Mode, Data Studio)
- Push updates (reverse ETL) back to source applications (e.g.,
Celigo, Get Census)
Imagining a Data Resort
April 21, 2021 § 1 Comment
A data resort is where data comes to get pampered, so that it is prepared to get back to work.
Motivation
The good news is that I finally understand how we really need to be managing all the business data in my organization. The bad news is that I don’t know how to articulate that in terms of industry-standard terminology (examples below). Worse, I’d probably use the wrong term (or the right term incorrectly) leading to endless rounds of frustrating conversation.
Therefore I’ve coined a new term (“data resort“) which I can define as the exact thing I want. Hopefully you my dear readers can help translate that into something concrete I can efficiently buy+build today!
Let me know your suggestions in the comments or via email.
« Read the rest of this entry »Become Like a Billionaire
December 10, 2020 § Leave a comment
- Obsess over a Wildly Important Problem that has not been properly characterized
- Identify a novel point of technological leverage for solving that problem
- Discover a market hurting enough to pay for even a crappy solution to that problem
- Iterate and improve on all the above until you die, fully solve the problem, or hand it over to someone who can do better.
My First Date with Quilt Data
July 21, 2020 § Leave a comment
I’ve known the good folks at Quilt Data for a long time. A company hackathon gave me a good excuse to actually use them “in anger” for an actual demo. These are my notes on how to configure quilt3 and create my first package (and panda data frame) from a CSV
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