From DBA or Data Engineer to AI Engineer: A Realistic Path

If you spend your days tuning queries, managing pipelines, or keeping a production database alive, you already carry most of what an AI engineering role needs. What is missing...

A Guatemalan's Guide to Drinking Coffee Properly

My mugI grew up surrounded by coffee farms in Guatemala and somehow spent most of my adult life drinking whatever was closest, usually instant, usually while standing over the...

Narrow Task Decomposition in AI Pipeline Agents

A nightly load into sales_fact fails. Ask an orchestrating agent to break down the diagnosis and it will usually stop at the first two subtasks that come to mind:...

Programmatic Tool Calling with the Claude SDK

Programmatic Tool Calling with the Claude SDK

Every morning somebody on the team runs the same check. Thirty tables in the staging schema, and the only thing anyone wants to...

Generate Embeddings in SQL with Aurora and Bedrock

Most embedding pipelines on AWS have the same shape: a job reads rows out of the database, calls Amazon Bedrock, and writes the vectors back. That is a second...

Match the Model to the Task, Not the App: An Orchestrator-Worker Pattern in Python

Most apps that call an LLM send every request to the same model. That works until the bill arrives.

A classification job that returns one word costs...

Moving On-Prem PostgreSQL to the Cloud: Picking the Right Path for Big Tables

Every PostgreSQL migration eventually hits the same fork in the road. The database is small enough to dump and restore in a maintenance window, or it isn't. Once you...

Setting Up a Mac for Data Engineering and AI Work

If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac with Apple Silicon is genuinely one of the best machines you can have as a...

Five Ways Redshift Serverless Quietly Eats Your Budget

It is Friday, the queries are running, and nobody is watching the bill. That is the whole charm of Redshift Serverless: you stop thinking about nodes and resizes. It...

Killing Explicit Sort Steps in Redshift with the Right SORTKEY

You paste a slow Redshift query plan into PlanTrace and one of the tuning insights reads "SORTKEY optimization candidate", pointing at an explicit sort step that's adding cost you...