This blog began life as a chronicle of my life inside a touring band with a music/business idea. The early days were me writing about letting go of an old dream so that I could have a new one. Then it sort of turned into an autobiography of the last 8 or so years of my life - moving from the music business into the tech business, fatherhood, life and all that.

For the last 8 years I've worked with, thought about, and written about a variety of web technologies - Drupal, Rails, Linux, AWS. My LinkedIn resume is here. I still think and occasionally write about the music business and other personal things but lately I'm using this as a scratch pad to write about my new gig.

So welcome and please have a look around.

- Grubb, November 2016

Hey there, just wanted to leave a signpost for you. My usecases lately have been something like -

Computing a BIG table, with a lot of math in it, over a LOT of rows of data, and then joining in other data to enrich the primary set. Specifically, this is container usage data, which I'm attempting to blend with our AWS bill to arrive at something like "cost per container" per time period.

I don't want to have to rebuild this table every day because most of the data is static once it shows...

Supposing a hypothetical organization that sold a product whose feature set and COGS closely followed a typical CSP like Amazon Web Services. That organization allows its customers to change products at will but must manually invoice a significant percentage of those sellables, therefore it needs a robust system to track changes to those sellables and ensure that they are properly charged at each turn of the billing cycle.

I’m picturing reporting format that reports on 2 different types...

First day of my job at my current employer (almost 7 years ago now) I crack open the company handbook to start onboarding. I remember it saying something like “Reservations are the lifeblood of this company” and thinking “wow, what does that mean?”

I’d had a job prior to this one that had some Stuff on AWS so I was familiar with the concept - something something pay upfront get reduced prices - but it as far from the lifeblood of the company. It was something the IT head took...

I've been kicking around this thought for a year or so now - to the outsider a career in data looks like a technical path. The data practitioner learns SQL, how to query data stored in a database somewhere using SQL, and if you know enough SQL you can answer any question whose artifacts are stored in that database somewhere.

The reality is that SQL is the very last mile. SQL is code, and so it looks to the non-practitioner like the act of creation, like code written in any imperative...

I had a really organized map of things in my head I’d like to tell my younger self about FinOps last night. This morning it is gone. Let this be a lesson to me - jot some notes down. It was a primer course, from the point of view of a data person who was placed in charge of a FinOps practice - how to think about FinOps, what data are you going to need, what do the terms and costs mean, etc.

So what is FinOps?

Well, it’s the driest sounding topic that I’ve ever found incredibly...