Welcome to FluentLake
I've been meaning to write things down for a long time. Not polished think-pieces, just the working notes I usually keep in scratch files and then lose. This is the place I'm going to keep them instead.
I work in data and analytics, mostly in the Microsoft world: Microsoft Fabric, lakehouses, Azure, Synapse, and a great deal of SQL. A lot of what I do is moving data from where it is to where it can answer a question, and making that path reliable enough that someone else can trust the answer. That work is full of small decisions that never make it into the documentation, and those small decisions are exactly what I want to capture here.
What this blog is
FluentLake is field notes from the lakehouse. The emphasis is on notes: short, specific, and written close to the moment I learned something. I'd rather publish one honest paragraph about a query plan than a tidy listicle I don't believe.
A few things you can expect:
- Lakehouse architecture, and the medallion pattern in particular. Bronze, silver, gold is easy to draw and harder to live with. I want to write about the parts that bite.
- Azure and Synapse trade-offs, with the reasoning attached. The conclusion is usually the least interesting part; the "why" is what transfers.
- SQL worth keeping. Queries that earned their place, and the tuning stories behind them.
- AI-assisted engineering, told straight. I build with Claude Code, Copilot CLI, and ChatGPT as part of the toolchain now. Some of it is genuinely transformative and some of it is overhyped, and I'd like to be honest about which is which.
What this blog isn't
It isn't a product. There's no course at the end, no newsletter wall, no growth funnel. If a post is useful to you, wonderful. If it's wrong, please tell me, because the fastest way I've found to learn something is to publish a confident mistake and get corrected.
It also isn't speaking for anyone but me. Nothing here is the official position of an employer or a client. These are my notes, my opinions, and my errors.
On writing in the open
The honest reason I'm doing this in public is that it makes me think more carefully. It's easy to half-understand something when it only lives in your head. The moment you have to explain it to a stranger, the gaps show up. Writing here is partly a forcing function: if I can't explain why I reached for a serverless SQL pool instead of a Fabric warehouse, I probably don't understand the choice well enough yet.
So that's the plan. Notes from the lakehouse, written while I'm still figuring it out, kept somewhere I won't lose them.
If you want to follow along, the RSS feed is the best way. Thanks for reading the first one.