Insights
Field notes from the work
Field notes from real analytics-engineering work — migrations, validation, and the silent traps you only see when you rebuild a system from source.
Verdict 22 field notes from real rebuilds
Latest I tripled my Claude Code throughput — measured, with scripts Three changes brought my Claude Max quota from 'out by Thursday' to 'full week with headroom.' Audit, methodology, and open-source telemetry scripts.
- 3 Signs Your Mid-Market Company Outgrew Its BI Tools Between $50M and $150M, the analytics tools that worked smaller become bottlenecks. Three concrete signs you've outgrown them — and the mid-market fix.
- dbt Testing: 4 Categories That Catch Everything dbt testing across 4 categories — schema, data, unit, reconciliation — with real SQL and YAML from a financial migration.
- AI in Analytics Engineering: What Actually Worked AI cut analytics engineering time 60% on a financial data migration. What worked, what failed, and the guardrail framework for financial systems.
- 606% ROI on a BI Migration: The Full Numbers $840K return on a 5-month Snowflake + dbt migration. 90% faster dashboards, 86% fewer models, Finance self-service. Full cost-vs-return breakdown.
- Why Your Analytics Migration Is an Investment, Not a Cost Analytics migration delivers 606% Year 1 ROI when treated as strategic investment. Learn the business case framework for modernizing legacy BI.
- Finance Self-Service: Sigma Input Tables + dbt Seeds Finance was filing Jira tickets to change one pricing rate. We wired Sigma input tables to dbt seeds — now they update pricing with no engineering.
- Cortex Analyst on Real Financial Data: What Worked We ran Cortex Analyst against production-validated dbt revenue data — 51 models, 6 product lines. The semantic layer worked, with caveats worth knowing.
- 86 Charts to 22 Pages: Keep/Merge/Kill Framework Keep/merge/kill framework for dashboard consolidation: 86 charts with 60s loads cut to 22 fast pages. How to audit, decide what to kill, restructure.
- 377 Legacy Objects to 51 dbt Models: A Snowflake Migration Three-layer dbt architecture + domain isolation + a reduction framework that cut 70% of legacy BI objects without losing reporting coverage.
- Okta + Snowflake Auth: Security vs Developer Velocity EXTERNALBROWSER fails headless. OIE rate-limits automation. IP whitelists block VPNs. Real auth friction from a 5-month Snowflake engagement.
- dbt Core in Snowflake Without dbt Cloud: 4 Constraints + Fixes Correlated subqueries fail silently, PARTITION BY macros return wrong results, seed types corrupt: 4 dbt-on-Snowflake gotchas with the workaround for each.
- When the Right Answer Is Deliberately Wrong Code A 15-month fiscal quarter bug found mid-migration. The correct move: replicate it, validate parity at 0.00%, then fix in a separate PR.
- The Hidden Tax of Snowflake RBAC (and How to Fix It) 17–26 hours lost to Snowflake permissions in 2 months. The fix: functional roles, future grants, and per-developer isolation patterns.
- Financial Migration Validation: 0.002% Accuracy Under $2,000 total variance on a multi-year revenue migration. Dual models, FULL OUTER JOIN at every grain, and parity-first discipline.
- 15 Silent Bugs in a Financial BI Migration 54% pricing discrepancy, a 15-month fiscal quarter error, and 13 more bugs found reconciling a financial BI system during migration to dbt + Snowflake.
- Scope Growth Done Right: 377 Objects to 161 Models How a dbt + Snowflake migration grew 5x without scope creep — domain isolation, validation gates, and a framework for saying yes vs. no.
- AI Guardrails That Outlast the Consultant A CLAUDE.md starter kit, pre-commit hooks, and domain context template — shipped on the last day so the team could use Claude Code safely without us.
- CLAUDE.md for dbt: What Goes in the File That Matters Most Three categories of CLAUDE.md content for financial dbt projects, plus OS-level hooks that prevent AI coding assistants from touching revenue data.
- Claude Code Breaks at 60%: The Five-File Fix 28 Claude Code sessions, 9 days, one dbt pricing rebuild. The context window degrades at 60% — here's the file-based memory system that prevents it.
- When Finance Has to Ask Engineering to Change a Price We replaced Jira tickets for pricing changes with Sigma input tables writing back to dbt seeds. Finance updates rates directly — architecture + audit trail.
- Why I Built Clarivant: The Mid-Market Analytics Gap After 15 years at P&G and eBay, I saw mid-market companies stuck on 60,000-row Excel files. Enterprise analytics shouldn't require enterprise budgets.
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