Data Engineering: Systems That Stay Up
A Boring (But Battle-Tested) Fabric Stack: Copy Job → dbt + Spark → MLV → Direct Lake
Why boring tools, clear responsibilities, and the right abstractions give me back my weekends.
Data engineering · AI · Infrastructure
Building systems that survive real life
Practical field notes about architecture, trade-offs, and the systems that have to keep working after the demo ends.
Latest field notes
Ideas tested against real systems.
Productivity Without the Hype
From 78% to DP-700 Certified: My Two-Week AI Study System
Two weeks before my DP-700 exam, I scored 78% on Microsoft’s practice assessment. Close. But still below its exam-readiness recommendation....
Data Engineering: Systems That Stay Up
The Missing Business Case for Medallion Architecture
Most Medallion explainers say what each layer does, never why it exists. The answer: Silver is the modern Operational Data Store.
Data Engineering: Systems That Stay Up
Materialized Lake Views Meet Kimball: Where Incremental Refresh Falls Apart
Is the 40-year-old Kimball dimensional model compatible with modern Materialized Lake Views? One Fabric engineer’s deep dive into late-arriving dimension corrections, incremental refresh limits, and why the real optimisation isn’t faster refreshes — it’s smaller ones.
Data Engineering: Systems That Stay Up
Web Scraping in Fabric: It’s a Rendering Problem, Not a Scraping Problem
Most web scraping problems aren’t really scraping problems. They’re rendering problems. Here’s what I learned when Power Query returned an empty div and Web Browser Content saved the day.
Data Engineering: Systems That Stay Up
Microsoft Fabric OneLake Security Is Finally GA — Here’s What You Need To Know
OneLake security just hit GA in May 2026 — and it’s a game-changer for Microsoft Fabric governance. Here’s how the new unified data plane security model closes the gaps between Power BI, Spark, and SQL analytics endpoints, with real code and gotchas I’ve learned the hard way.
Data Engineering: Systems That Stay Up
Microsoft Fabric ETL: Escape the Notebook Monolith
We’ve all been there: it starts as a simple proof-of-concept. You open up a new Notebook in Microsoft Fabric, write...
Engineering AI: Beyond the Prompt
Using an AI Agent for Code Review (Without Letting It Merge Code)
Code review is where systems stay good, but it is also where teams burn out. This guide shows you how to deploy a “tireless junior reviewer” using GitHub Actions—an AI agent that provides structured feedback without the risks of auto-merging or authority.
Productivity Without the Hype
Why My Next ‘Small Script’ Starts with Objects, Not Functions
It always starts the same way. You just need a small script. In my case, it was “just” a helper...
Data Engineering: Systems That Stay Up
Choosing the Right Identity for Testing: Why I Stopped Using My Own Account
A few years ago, I was testing an Azure Function that pulled secrets from Key Vault. It worked flawlessly on...