Back in the day, I wrote, and it was a good thing. You see, the process of writing about something, at least for me, forces me to turn the ideas around in my head, and look at them from ALL the different angles until I have the ability to clearly articulate what’s actually there. My truth is that if I don’t have the ability to write clearly about something, then I really haven’t yet fully ingested it and integrated it into my paradigm of today’s data world. Along the way somehow, I stopped using writing as my way to get to that place. Life got busy. Other priorities got shifted up, and writing got shifted down.
What I lost in the doing of all the other things, was the higher level thinking about HOW I should be doing them. I gave up the space I had used to really think about how it all fits together. Couple that with the data world as it is today, and that’s not a good thing because the big picture is changing and it’s changing fast. ChatGPT, Copilot and all of the LLM’s are somewhere between the best and worst thing ever. I don’t think I’ve figured all the places where I definitely have to be using it and where I’d be crazy to use it, but I do know that it’s important. Microsoft called their release of Fabric their biggest in the data space since SQL Server. That sure sounds to me like leaning in and re-establishing our tried and true templates under that umbrella even with it’s immaturity in certain areas. AWS is pushing AI training out to the masses with the creation of free training content while also spending millions funding scholarships.
All of this just continues to shine a huge spotlight on the fact that the bottleneck in the process of building cool stuff with all of this new technology is us. There just aren’t enough people that have a full grasp of the both the art of the possible and the tools and skills required to make those possibilities reality.
So here’s my pledge. This year, I’m going to start over and use this space to help focus what I’m aiming at. I’m going to take all those squirrels that I get distracted by and fit them into the bigger picture. I’m going to more selectively chase with more specific intention. I’m going to make a commitment to this practice of writing and integrating over the course of the next year and see what comes of it. It’s definitely going to be good for me, and hopefully it’ll be good for you as well.
I know that no one is going to read this post right now, but if I do follow the path that I’ve set out for myself, there will be people that will trace it all back and they will know that I’ve succeeded in changing that first line back to “I write, and it’s a good thing.”
Finding Order in the Chaos 