Reading · journal

Notes & writing

Short field notes on data engineering, public health, AI, and operating institutions in complex environments.

June 1, 2024 · 7 min · Public health
Using satellite imagery to improve immunization coverage in DRC
Only one in three children in the DRC is fully immunized. Here's how semi-automated micro-planning documents — built from satellite-derived population data — helped change that.
July 4, 2025 · 6 min · AI · Agents
What I learned building Pmail, an agentic email client
Notes from putting Claude in charge of an inbox — what tools to give it, what tools to absolutely not give it, and why the boring product surface matters more than the model.
April 22, 2025 · 5 min · Data engineering
Why dbt belongs in government IT
Procurement loves stored procedures and Excel exports. Here's the case for putting a modern transformation layer in a public-sector data stack.

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April 22, 2025·Data engineering·5 min

Why dbt belongs in government IT

Procurement loves stored procedures and Excel exports. Here's the case for putting a modern transformation layer in a public-sector data stack.

When I joined African Shipping Management, the data architecture was a stack of opaque stored procedures bolted to a SQL Server.

Why I reached for dbt

Version control: every transformation lives in Git.
Lineage: dbt's DAG tells you exactly which downstream tables move.
Contracts: dbt tests force the team to declare what 'valid' means.

The political work

The hardest part was getting procurement comfortable with an open-source tool.

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