My Writings
Here are some writings that I have done on various topics. Some of these are older (as seen in the date), and came from my old personal website.
Here are some writings that I have done on various topics. Some of these are older (as seen in the date), and came from my old personal website.
Creating a Lakehouse Service: Part 2: Creating K8s Resources
This is part two of a longer series and here is the link to the previous part. sitrep Ok, so after part one, we have: an init script that can be used to “pre-configure” our duckdb session a working k8s pod configuration a custom duckdb-based image that runs our init script and launches UI an nginx sidecar that actually exposes the duckdb UI a configured traefik IngressRoute to access the nginx exposed port But, this is only for one pod. We want this to be “scalable”, so that many users can each have their own pod/session and are connected to the same Iceberg tables.
Creating a Lakehouse Service: Part 1: Deploying a UI Pod
This is part one of a longer series . On a personal note, I really enjoyed this part of the project because it helped me solidify some knowledge and learned some new stuff in the process. Selecting Tools DuckDB I knew that I could use open table formats pretty easily with some of the more popular distributed engines such as Snowflake. But, after the Small Data 2025 conference, I was particularly motivated to see how much use I could get out of DuckDB and some of its built in tooling, such as the new UI. Additionally, I have been really impressed with DuckDB’s integrations. Not only have they been focusing on compatibility with different open table formats, but they’ve been putting their engine in some pretty cool places .
Creating a Lakehouse Service: Background
I haven’t written nearly as much as I’d have liked to. However, I’m starting a new job next week and took the holiday week off in between jobs and decided it was a good time to hack around a bit. This will be part one (zero?) of a multiple-part series (as I actually start to piece these things together). Lakehouse? Very early on in my data scientist-to-engineer transition, the lakehouse became a very appealing architecture pattern and started receiving a lot of attention. At work (previous employer), we were working on migrating analytics workloads off of a SQL Server and onto Snowflake. For a hackathon (three-ish years ago!), my team and I decided to take a look at the dbt-external-tables package for some ingestion tasks. At the time, the package was really focused on snowpipes, so that was the focus of our project as well.
Football, especially college football, was a big part of my childhood. Sunday night football was the wrap-up to my weekend. Holidays spent with my family always consisted of watching and playing some form of football. My grandpa was a high school football coach for 40 years. My favorite part about watching games with my grandpa was not only that I learned something new every time, but that he had a little phrase for everything. “X player (Janikowski) is automatic”. “It’s better to be lucky than good”. But perhaps the one I understood least as a kid: “it ain’t over ’til it’s over”, or, alternatively, regardless of how much time was actually left, “there’s a lot of game left”.
…if you’re going to get mad at the publisher
One month after saying I was going to write more , here goes. This one has been in my head for a while, but I never could quite put words exactly to my idea. So this is a little more “stream of consciousness” than usual. Something that I have never understood is people getting mad at a platform/publication for their “opinion” content. It seems to me that most people gloss over the word opinion in the very section in which they are clicking or the very article that they are reading.
On sign stealing in college football
Frontmatter The University of Michigan football program has been embroiled in sign-stealing allegations for the past couple of weeks. Before I begin, I will preface this by disclosing that I grew up, and remain, a Michigan football fan, though I did not attend the school. Fortunately, however, I have worked in college football for three seasons, and have a different perspective than most fans have to offer on the matter. I wanted to share my thoughts and perspective for this very reason; I think most people who have not been exposed to the day-to-day of working in college football do not have a full understanding of the complexities of this “case”. I want to address the story in a way that does not disclose too much about who I have worked with and that sort of thing. I do not have any relationship to anybody on the current Michigan staff, however.
College Football · College Sports · Football
Introduction The NCAA is a shell of what it used to be. Increasingly, the “revenue-generating” sports (namely men’s football and men’s basketball) are forcing the NCAA’s hand in regards to changing long-held beliefs and principles, affecting all NCAA-sponsored competitions and sports. As state legislatures and legislators continue to pass bills that hamper the NCAA from effectively enforcing their principle-driven rules, how should the NCAA and professional sports leagues be handling the problem? Is this the end of the NCAA? Or have rumors of its demise been greatly exaggerated?
Basketball · College Basketball · College Football · College Sports · Football
Leaving the CS:GO analysis content on old blog
Link to content . In the summer between the final two semesters of my Master’s program (spring and winter 2020), I did some analysis projects relating to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), one of the more popular game for esport competitions. “Why were you spending time analyzing esports?”, you may ask. The year of 2020 was not a great one for the world, most notably to the Coronavirus pandemic and related shutdowns. This was unfortunate for me on two fronts: 1. I was looking for work or an internship over the summer of 2020; the economic uncertainty adversely affected the prospects of that, and 2. I am an avid sports fan (see ballmart ) and the shutdown resulted in many leagues suspending play.
Power 6(?): Analyzing the Concentration of Power in FBS
Idea The idea behind this short project was a graphic that is displayed during ESPN’s bowl games. The graphic showed the records of each FBS conference in out of conference games throughout the season as well as the conferences’ bowl records. This was interesting at the time because the American Athletic Conference had started their “Power 6” slogan, asserting that they should be considered with the top 5 conferences, instead of the lower “Group of 5” conferences. Indeed, in this particular year, the American had outperformed the Big 12 in out-of-conference win percentage.
Analysis · College Football · Football