Leadership

12 Steps to Better Data Engineering

Let me tell you about the moment I stopped trusting architecture diagrams. I was three days into a new role, getting up to speed with the data team. Smart people. Modern stack. On paper, everything looked right. They walked me through a beautiful data platform diagram: clean lines, labelled layers, colour-coded domains. It looked like something you’d see in a data conference. Then I asked a question that changed everything: “Can you rebuild your finance table from scratch right now?”

Saturday, March 7, 2026 Read

What an NBA Coach Can Teach Data Leaders About Building Teams That Actually Work

I was three hours into a retrospective that had devolved into blame-shifting when the most senior engineer on the team finally spoke up. “Look,” he said, “we can keep pointing fingers at the data model, or we can admit we don’t actually trust each other enough to have an honest conversation about what went wrong.” The room went quiet. He was right. That moment stuck with me because it exposed something I’ve seen destroy more data teams than bad architecture ever could: the absence of genuine connection between people who spend forty-plus hours a week depending on each other.

Monday, February 2, 2026 Read

The Duct Tape Data Engineer

The Engineer Who Ships I want to tell you about a data engineer I worked with. Let’s call her Sarah. Sarah had a reputation. When business stakeholders had an urgent question—the kind that arrives at 4 PM on a Friday with the CEO’s name in the subject line—they went to Sarah. Not to the senior architect with the impeccable data model. Not to the platform team with their carefully orchestrated Airflow DAGs. They went to Sarah.

Saturday, January 24, 2026 Read

Why Your Ideas Die in Planning Meetings

The silence that kills good ideas One morning, I sat in yet another meeting where we just spent two weeks backfilling a table then we found it was riddled with issues with the data. Even if we resolve the issue, it would then be another 2 weeks to backfill the data, there has to be a better way. “So, what do we think? Give me your best ideas for tackling this.”

Wednesday, January 7, 2026 Read

The Science of Conversation for people who hate small talk

One morning, I watched a data engineer struggle with using AI for thirty minutes, trying to debug a DBT job. The problem wasn’t the LLM’s capabilities—it was how the engineer framed the question. No context about what they’d already tried. No explanation of the expected versus actual output. Just “fix this code” followed by a massive code dump. This same engineer had similar struggles with stakeholders. Presentations that assumed too much context. Emails that buried the ask. Meetings where they answered questions nobody asked.

Sunday, January 4, 2026 Read

The Invisible PR You're Building Right Now

The Email That Changed Everything I received a meeting invite labeled “Check In” and it was to discuss news about the restructure. In a few months, my role would be gone. I was still processing it, sitting with that particular brand of numbness that comes when your career gets upended. In the following weeks, my inbox started filling up. LinkedIn messages. Texts. Emails from people I’d worked with years ago.

Monday, December 8, 2025 Read

The Four Stages of Data Quality: From Hidden Costs to Measurable Value

This is the fundamental problem with data quality. You know it matters. Everyone knows it matters. But until you can quantify the impact, connect it to business outcomes, and build a credible business case, it remains this abstract thing that’s important but never urgent enough to properly fund. I wrote a practical guide to data quality last week that walks through hands-on implementation—the SQL queries, the profiling techniques, the actual mechanics of finding and fixing data issues. Think of that as the “how to use the tools” guide. This article is different. This is the “why these tools matter and how to convince your organization to actually use them” guide.

Monday, November 24, 2025 Read

When Pirates Offered Better Service

The Day Music Changed Forever On June 1, 1999, an eighteen-year-old kid in a Northeastern University dorm room launched something that would bring the music industry to its knees. Shawn Fanning called it Napster, and within two years, 80 million people were using it to download 14,000 songs every minute.1 The technology was simple: a central server indexed which songs each user had, then let computers talk directly to each other. No complicated setup. No technical expertise required. Just type in “Metallica” and boom—there it was.

Sunday, November 16, 2025 Read

Discover our best selves

Introduction Here’s what nobody tells you about: your biggest blind spot isn’t your technical weaknesses—it’s your strengths. That sounds weird doesn’t it. Most of us can recite our shortcomings on command, yet we struggle to articulate what we’re genuinely good at. This isn’t just modesty. It’s a fundamental quirk of human psychology that keeps us from reaching our full potential. The Reflected Best Self Portrait exercise, developed by researchers at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, flips this script entirely. Instead of the usual deficit-focused approach (“here’s what you need to fix”), it asks a radical question: what if we built our careers around who we are when we’re at our absolute best? For data professionals navigating an industry that’s constantly evolving—where yesterday’s cutting-edge tool becomes today’s legacy system—this approach isn’t just refreshing. It’s essential.

Saturday, November 1, 2025 Read

Rolling for Initiative: How Dungeons & Dragons Taught Me Everything About Team Leadership

The Unexpected Training Ground I never thought a game about pretending to be elves and wizards would teach me more about leadership than any management training I’ve ever attended. But here we are. Growing up, Dungeons & Dragons was this weird thing you did if you had friends—which, honestly, I didn’t have a lot of. My best friend and I played these sort of solo-person adventures, just the two of us hunched over character sheets and dice on pumped up inflatable air beds in the living room. It wasn’t exactly the epic party campaigns you see on Critical Role, but it was still magic. Years passed. We got older. Eventually, we managed to rope in some other friends, and now? Now we’ve got a whole group that gets together yearly, and those weekends have become something we all look forward to more than just about anything else.

Sunday, October 26, 2025 Read

From Compliance to Commitment: What Decades of Research Reveals About Moral Courage

The Question That Launched a Six-Year Study A twelve-year-old boy watched from a rooftop as soldiers spent 18 hours eliminating a thousand people. He was the only survivor from his entire family. When he finally escaped and stumbled barefoot across the countryside, a peasant woman opened her door, took one look at him, and without hesitation pulled him inside—despite knowing she’d face execution if discovered. Four decades later, that boy—now sociology professor Samuel Oliner—launched a six-year study interviewing 700 Europeans to answer the question that haunted him: Why did she risk everything when so many others didn’t?

Saturday, October 25, 2025 Read

The Superpower of Clear Communication: Mastering Volume, Melody, Tonality, and Pause

The Meeting That Changed Everything Picture this: It’s the quarterly business review, and your team’s project is on the chopping block. Budget cuts are looming, and you have fifteen minutes to convince the leadership team that your data initiative deserves continued funding. You’ve prepared extensively. Your slides are perfect. Your data is compelling. But as you begin presenting, you notice glazed expressions around the table. One person is checking her phone. Another is drumming his fingers impatiently.

Saturday, September 20, 2025 Read