Community

I’m heading to Barcelona for FabCon Europe, and this year I’m attending without a session of my own. That changes the rhythm of the trip. More time to follow conversations with product teams, listen to other speakers, and work out which Fabric developments actually deserve attention. I’ll be gathering material for Knee-Deep in Tech Topics and exploring what the announcements really mean for practitioners. Also: finally visiting Barcelona, which is a substantial bonus. If you’re there, come say hello.

My Data Platform MVP renewed for another year, nearly a decade now. I should feel celebratory. Mostly I feel like I owe somebody money. Because none of it was mine to begin with. Every door was opened by someone who didn’t have to. But the compact that built this community, where you give it away and trust it comes back around, I’m not sure it holds anymore. We built the library. Someone else started charging admission.

Years ago, fear kept me silent about bad actors in tech. Now stepping away from Data Weekender after organizers kept a speaker with documented harmful behavior. Safety demands action, not just codes of conduct. No longer afraid to speak out.

I just had an absolute blast presenting at the Data Platform Discovery Days - both the European and the US edition! For the US edition I presented “Azure Machine Learning for the Absolute Beginner”, a session looking at machine learning in general, walking through Azure Machine Learning and giving several examples of machine learning in action - in both expected and unexpected places! The European edition asked for “Building an Empire - Implementing Power BI Step by Step”, a session on Power BI, datasets and dataflows.