Data Alchemist.
Forty years of
turning messy data
into something useful.

40 years across three eras

Pre-digital at a video store. The database era at Andersen Consulting and the Financial Times. The modern stack at Talpa, Rabobank, Booking.com, SURFsara. That range is rare.

Built it, didn’t just talk about it

Production systems, ML models, scientific data management, Data Vault, streaming, dbt/Snowflake/Databricks/PySpark at scale. Every opinion earned in production.

Synthesiser, not specialist

You don’t need another opinion on dbt vs SQLMesh. You need someone who can tell you which of the four things you think need fixing actually matters.

The career arc

The History of Data project

I’m writing a book — History of Data: From Cave Paintings to Lakehouses. Forty-seven thousand years of the same patterns repeating. The free e-book is the first six chapters.

The reason I write it isn’t nostalgia. It’s that every problem I’ve been paid to solve in the last decade was solved, in slightly different clothing, by someone in Rome or Baghdad or Leiden three hundred years ago. Pattern recognition is the actual skill.