The beginning

I’m recently needed to implement a Business Intelligence (BI) layer for a client. By ‘Business Intelligence’ I mean the capacity to extract data in real time about my client’s business and present it on a suitable way. I know this may be a rather vague usage of the term, but for this use case I needed to deliberately ommit the details of a ‘standard’ data pipeline. I will now give some context for what I mean whith ‘standard data pipeline’.

All of my life I have kept all kinds of journals. Some of them have burned on house fires (not joking), some of them I have ripped apart myself. Recently, however, I´ve seen the benefits of keeping what Simon Willison frames as a “laboratory notebook¨ to maximize programming productivity in his 2022 DjangoCon Us talk.

Willison suggests that the key of being productive is not having to remember anything, which rings particularly true to me. I have a number of scattered org-files and handmade notes on programming that I constantly go back to. I have tried various kind of frameworks. Most recently, a combination of digital Zettlekasten and bullet journaling. However, I have always felt something was lacking.