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Strategy is a Story
In 2016, during my MBA at Cal State Long Beach, I competed in a semester-long business simulation competition. Five teams running fictional companies, making quarterly decisions on pricing, production, marketing, and R&D. I was the CIO for ours. When I downloaded the year 3 quarter 4 reports, I found the first of two questions that…
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How do you count a million milk crates?
We were losing hundreds of thousands of milk crates a year. At $4 a piece, it was half a million dollars. Conventional wisdom was that the majority of the loss was stores using them for storage, or people taking them home for furniture or their garage, but the volume we were seeing had nothing to…
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In-Spec Isn’t Good Enough
Note: the numbers have been changed for privacy. Every quality check was passing. Customers were calling in about a chemical taste in the water anyway. Both of those things were true at the same time. I was a continuous improvement leader at a manufacturing plant that produced spring water and drinking water alongside dairy products.…
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Making Tempeh: An Unreasonably Thorough Approach
Challenging Tempeh making community advice with an Arduino and a sewing machine.
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The Price of a Hidden Column
In March I spent a weekend running test queries through Power BI Copilot on a Fabric F2 capacity, reviewing the diagnostic JSON to understand how to improve my reports. One of those diagnostics is the reason for this post. When I asked a question about product growth trends, the answer had taken 107 seconds to…
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Is It Okay?
I built an MCP (Model Context Protocol) that gives an LLM five tools for working with a data lake: list tables, describe schema, sample data, row count, run query. I use it every day. Different data sets, different questions. It supports different workflows. You can paste a screenshot, tell the agent “replicate this data and…
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How to Keep Power BI Copilot in Its Fast Lane
This is a companion piece to How Power BI Copilot Works Under the Hood. In the main post I traced the full pipeline from question to answer, but one of the more practical findings was about the two paths Copilot can take to resolve a data question. One is fast and reliable. The other is…
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Fabric Costing
The Bill Power BI is part of the Fabric ecosystem. Fabric is an end-to-end data platform, including ingestion, warehousing, outflows, and dashboarding, including Copilot for Power BI. The costing for Fabric involves you purchasing capacity units (CU), from F2 for 2, to F2048. Capacity units are measured in seconds. If you have 2 capacity units…
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The Telephone Game
I spent last weekend testing out Copilot for Power BI. I’ve been using it extensively as a developer, trying to make something that’s useful for people. I’ve been growing more skeptical of all my technical skills. I went into the Azure calculator, pulled up the resource usage, all told would be no more than $5.00.…
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Hands-Free French Dictionary
I have my concerns about AI coding. There’s an aphorism, the confidence about replacing a job with automation is highest when you are least familiar with it. For AI, in my domain, that’s been my experience. It can write SQL queries that run, but miss the context. It can scaffold out a Pytorch model, but…
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Looking under the hood for Power BI Copilot
Power BI Copilot doesn’t document how it processes questions internally. The closest that I’ve found is in Microsoft Learn (below). I’m writing what I’ve found using Copilot’s diagnostic JSON across three environments, Desktop, Power BI Service (not edit mode), and the sidebar Copilot in Power BI. I spent a weekend setting up a Fabric F2…
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When the Model Isn’t the Answer
If you stare at any two datasets long enough, you can convince yourself there’s a connection between them. Not because there is, but because there is an important enough question that the data “should” be connected. It’s a dangerous place from which to start a modeling project. This is one such story. Enter multi-instance-learning, and…