The Curious Engineer

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Data People Etc.

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Data, people, and the rest of the things. Click to read "Data People Etc.", by Stephen Bailey, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

Essays / personalDatabasesSoftware / engineering practice

’21’22’23’24’25’26
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72 from 31 Dec 2021 to 18 Aug 2025
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now and then
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personal blog
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2025 11

  1. Discarded drafts, cleaning house, etc.
  2. Worlds are story scaffolds
  3. Context is the new frontend
  4. Shift left, ship everywhere
  5. Real Time Data System
  6. Data management is a moldy problem
  7. How to destroy a world
  8. Strong worlds, weak worlds, SaaS worlds, link worlds
  9. Worldbuilding with data
  10. Discussion: The AI Era Liberal Arts
  11. 5 Great Books from 2024

2024 20

  1. Decision Tree
  2. Ant farms and PEER Protocols
  3. Data's final format
  4. Get the weekly rites right
  5. Below the API
  6. The reading apocalypse, protocol fiction, etc.
  7. The Three Jobs
  8. Clutter is the cost of cheap
  9. Tables are furniture
  10. Dadministrivia
  11. Re-appropriating “age appropriate”
  12. Docker for Data Products
  13. Analysis / Synthesis
  14. The Dark Ages, or Second Grade
  15. Trivium Night
  16. Front Door, Bathroom, Kitchen, Classroom
  17. The middle, homeschool, paid subs, etc.
  18. The Little EM That Could
  19. James and the Giant Pitch
  20. The Cat in the HatGPT

2023 19

  1. Book Notes: The Internet is not what you think it is
  2. The Carnot Belief Engine
  3. Symposium hangover, Substack Notes, etc.
  4. Orchestration isn’t going anywhere
  5. 28 Dags Later
  6. Data Materialization is a Convergence Problem
  7. Life After Orchestrators
  8. Limits of the Event-Driven Orchestrator
  9. Good data engineers are lazy
  10. Will active metadata eat the orchestrator?
  11. Nobody Should Write ETL
  12. Data in a Downturn
  13. Symposium update, Kimball modeling, quality koalas, etc.
  14. Data, Despair, and the FLOWBEE
  15. Highlights from the Comments on Elitism as Mid-Career Growth Engine
  16. Elitism as the Mid-Career Growth Engine
  17. Symposium: Is the orchestrator dead or alive?
  18. On Sight and Insight
  19. One Year In

2022 21

  1. The Modern Data Graph
  2. In Search of the Übergraph
  3. The Data Horror Picture Show
  4. What, exactly, isn't dbt?
  5. Two Party System
  6. Data Person: Attorney At Law
  7. The Prodigal Data Scientist
  8. Airflow's Problem
  9. Eight Archetypes of Data Citizens
  10. Beyond One and Zero
  11. The Optimetricist
  12. Product Sketch: Airflow, The Game
  13. Comment on 'Tuning Whatnot's Data Platform for Speed and Scale'
  14. Thread: How did your college degree improve your data practice?
  15. Product Sketch: The New Corp Times
  16. Wander Well
  17. Perennial Truth Architectures
  18. Kicking the tires on dbt Metrics
  19. How to Feed a Data Professional
  20. Data Is The New Motor Oil
  21. Product Sketch: Segment for Metadata

2021 1

  1. Welcome to Data People Etc.