Blog

Miscellaneous Ramblings of Varying Coherence

Querying Avro Files With Presto. It is possible!

written by Don Albrecht on 2018-08-07

Presto’s Hive connector proudly declares that it supports AVRO. However, if you’ve ever tried to query a Hive built AVRO table from Presto, you may have gotten a pretty cryptic error message. cannot find field id from...

Momentum, Resilience and Dave Ramsey

written by Don Albrecht on 2018-08-06

For those of you unaware, Dave Ramsey runs a popular provider of financial advice based out of Tennessee. While he operates in a radically different domain, he can provide a useful model for managing the resources within a startup or business...

An Introduction to Technical Capital

written by Don Albrecht on 2018-08-05

We spend a fair amount of time talking about technical debt. While there’s a fair bit of content to discuss around these issues, today I’d like to bring attention to the flip side of this issue. I call this concept, Technical Capital as it is...

Balancing Elegance and Operations in ETL

written by Don Albrecht on 2018-08-04

Imagine the perfect data warehouse for your business. It probably consists of a set of elegant Stars or even Neutron Stars for each of your critical business entities organized into a relatively simple snowflake. It would be easy to manage, all of...

Why I Built This Site With Lektor And Would I Recommend It?

written by Don Albrecht on 2018-08-03

When I built the new DonAlbrecht.com I had a few primary objectives: 1. I wanted to keep costs as low as possible 2. I didn’t want to run a server 3. I didn’t want to avoid comment maintenance. 4. I still wanted full control over the theming and...

My Cancer Journey

written by Don Albrecht on 2018-08-02

In the spring of 2013, my father died of cancer. It was fast, untreatable, and unexpected. In fact he went from a trip to the emergency room to deceased in about 4 weeks. 2 years later, I found a lump in my neck. I spent the next 2 months working...

Welcome to Blogust

written by Don Albrecht on 2018-08-01

I’ve not been as productive at populating this new site as I’d hoped. There’s plenty of legitimate reasons, but I’m just not making the progress I’d hoped and intended when I started the new site. I write for this site as a way of putting my...

12 Factor Apps in Data Engineering

written by Don Albrecht on 2018-05-02

Most of the best practices embodied in 12-factor applications align between Data Engineering and Software-as-a-Service workloads. Unfortunately, the two disciplines have a handful of key differences that make one size fits all solutions difficult...

Stepping Away From Facebook

written by Don Albrecht on 2017-12-04

Over the summer I started to notice just how much time I was spending on Facebook. Partly, I think it was my reading of Ben Thompson's Stratechery that made me most acutely aware of it. Facebook capitalizes on attention; it succeeds on mobile by...

Treat Your Data Like Caviar

written by Don Albrecht on 2017-11-15

Recently, I was served 11 Madison’s park take on eggs Benedict. A truly decadent dish involving quails egg, ham, asparagus, and caviar all served in an attractive Art Deco tin. True to tradition, the utensil was an elegant Mother of Pearl spoon. ...