Writing
Data engineering, platform architecture, and practical automation. Judgement and trade-offs, not tutorials.
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Agent Intelligence Outran Agent Reliability
Model capability leapt while production reliability lagged. The next eighteen months belong to verification loops, harness engineering, and teams that close the gap.
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Agentic Systems Have Three Learning Layers and the Model Is the Slowest
Agentic systems improve at the model, harness, and context layers. Most teams wait for the model. The compounding advantage sits in the two you own.
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Loop Engineering for Microsoft Fabric: AI Agents, TE2, and Building DAX at Scale
TE2 C# scripts and an AI agent built hundreds of DAX measures across twenty-five Fabric semantic models. Loop engineering, not prompt engineering.
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What Makes a Data Platform AI-Ready Before Anyone Adds an LLM
Organisations chase AI by bolting models onto fragile pipelines. The real work is upstream: quality, lineage, contracts, and governance that make AI safe.
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Why Your Semantic Model Does Not Belong in a PBIX File
Twenty-five Power BI reports on one Fabric lakehouse. Decoupled semantic models, medallion layers, Direct Lake, and PBIX files with nothing in them.
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Tokens Are Currency and the Subsidy Will Not Last
AI providers are subsidising tokens to drive adoption. When that ends, engineers without optimisation habits will feel it. Is your spend big enough to care?
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Designing Data Platform Architecture for the Team You Will Have in Two Years
Most platform architecture is designed for today's team. In two years the team is bigger, the requirements are different, and the shortcuts are load-bearing.
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Why Your dbt Project Will Become Unmaintainable
dbt makes it easy to start a data transformation layer. It also makes it easy to build one nobody can reason about six months later. The patterns that rot.
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Test Harnesses for Data Pipelines: Engineering Confidence at Every Layer
Testing data pipelines isn't like testing application code. Messy inputs, probabilistic outputs, expensive infrastructure. How to build harnesses that work.
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Data Quality Gates That Actually Work in Production
Most quality gates fire so often they get ignored or sit silent while bad data flows downstream. Build gates that catch real problems without crying wolf.
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When Your Data Warehouse Needs a Second Act
Every data warehouse I have joined was overdue for redesign. The signals are consistent, the migration path known, and the biggest risk is waiting too long.
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Your PI Historian's Compression Settings Are Silently Destroying Your Analytics
OSIsoft PI's swinging door compression is brilliant for storage. It's also silently eating the data points your analytics need for correct averages and trends.
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The OPC Timestamp Gotcha That Silently Shifts Your Entire Historian Dataset
When a PLC stores local time and the OPC server assumes UTC, every historian data point is wrong by your timezone offset. Daylight saving makes it worse.
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Ellipse to Maximo Migration: The Equipment Hierarchy Problem Nobody Warns You About
Migrating Ellipse to Maximo in a mining operation sounds like a data mapping exercise. It's actually an ontological argument about what an asset is.
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SAP PM Counter Overflow and the Haul Truck That Got Maintained Twice
When an equipment counter overflows, SAP PM calculates a negative usage delta. The consequences for mining fleet maintenance are worse than you think.
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The Maximo Integration That Stopped Sending Data and Nobody Noticed for Six Weeks
IBM Maximo's MIF outbound queue can die silently — no error log, no alert, no notification. Here's how it happens and how to build monitoring that catches it.
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Fraud Scoring on High-Velocity Card Data: When Regression Outperformed Classification
Classification vs regression on a 200K-row synthetic card fraud dataset. Why probability scoring beat hard classification for high-velocity transactions.
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The Two-Second Window: Building Data Pipelines for Real-Time Fraud Decisioning
When your fraud system takes too long, the card scheme decides for you. Real-time scoring, streaming storage, and what happens when the pipeline fails.