April 30, 2026

Hello, world

First post on the new site — stack overview and what's coming.

meta

This is the first post on the new site.

After years of meaning to start a proper engineering blog, this is me actually doing it.

Who this is for

Senior+ data engineers who've been around long enough to be skeptical of hype. People who appreciate honest trade-off analysis over vendor-sponsored "best practices."

The stack

  • Next.js 16 — App Router, React Server Components
  • MDX via fumadocs-mdx — posts live in content/ as .mdx files
  • Tailwind CSS v4 — no config file, CSS-native tokens
  • Syntax highlighting via rehype-pretty-code + Shiki
# Obligatory first-post hello world
def main():
    print("persistentengineer.com is live")
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Infrastructure: Cloudflare (DNS, CDN, Email), Vercel (hosting), Neon (Postgres for view counters).

-- View counter — every post gets one
CREATE TABLE views (
    id      SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
    slug    TEXT NOT NULL,
    ts      TIMESTAMPTZ DEFAULT now(),
    ip_hash TEXT  -- hashed, not stored raw
);

What's coming

Essays on topics I've been thinking about:

  • Why your dbt project will become unmaintainable (and what to do)
  • Apache Iceberg snapshot isolation — a practical deep-dive
  • Streaming is mostly batch in disguise

TIL — short notes on things I discover during daily work.

Projects — case studies on real systems, including an LLM-based MR review agent built with FastAPI, Qdrant, and Claude API.

Subscribe to the RSS feed: /rss.xml

Open to senior+ Data Engineering roles in AU/NZ/EU/US — get in touch.