You don't need Snowflake. You don't need a $100k/year data platform. You just need a SQL database and a ChatGPT subscription.

I get a lot of LinkedIn messages from people trying to break into data and AI. I try to respond to all of them. At the peak, I had 2-3 people I was actively mentoring with bi-weekly check-ins. Over the years, I've watched dozens of people go through this process. Some land roles in a month or two, others struggle for much longer.

More than half stop responding after I give advice. It could be my advice comes across as harsh. Rather than commiserating about external factors, I try to focus on what's controllable. Here's what I've learned from watching this play out.

From Hugo to Framer to Docusaurus in a month.

How the Drata team went from "just pass it to Claude" to a multi-stage pipeline that automates months of engineering work.

How Clobotics Runs Distributed Image Processing

Profiling large-scale data for use cases such as anomaly detection, drift detection, and data validation.

Examining the limitations of the SQL interface for distributed computing workflows.

A deep look at the assumptions of the Pandas interface

Increase developer productivity and decrease costs for big data projects

Run PyCaret functions on each partition of data distributedly