AI: Nobody’s in There is free to read at pinaldave.com if money is tight, and worth buying if you can. 30 deeply human essays on AI, love, and loss.
AI: Nobody’s in There, and That Is Good News
AI: Nobody’s in There is 30 short, honest essays on judgment, learning, and work with AI. No hype, no doom, and why the empty machine is good news.
Database Performance Health Check: Six Months Slow, Fixed in 75 Minutes
Six months of slow SQL, fixed in 75 minutes. See what a database performance health check finds, and how one focused 4-hour session ends the guessing.
Data Quality and Observability: A Field Guide in Six Parts
Master data quality and observability in six parts: name the problem, rank the risk, define rules, place controls, monitor for drift, and respond calmly.
You Just Found Bad Data in Production. Now What?
Found bad data in production? Use this data incident response playbook: triage, contain, trace the source, fix, verify, tell people, and review calmly.
It Passed Every Test and Still Broke: Four Signals Validation Never Catches
Every test passed and the dashboard still broke. Here are four signals validation never catches: freshness, volume, schema drift, and distribution shift.
Where Should a Data Quality Check Live? Gates, Controls, and Quarantine
A check in the wrong place catches bad data too late. See where each data quality check belongs: ingestion, transformation, release gates, and quarantine.
“Clean Data” Is Not a Requirement: Writing Rules People Can Act On
Clean is a feeling, not a spec. Write data quality rules people can act on, with a testable check, a threshold, and a named owner, so every failure is owned.
Count Is Not Risk: Ranking Data Issues by What They Actually Cost
The biggest pile of errors is rarely your biggest problem. Try ranking data issues by impact and likelihood, not row count, and fix what actually hurts.
Data Quality, Data Reliability, and Data Observability: Telling the Three Apart
“The dashboard is wrong” hides three problems. Learn how data quality, data reliability, and data observability differ, and which one you are actually facing.