Hello, world

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

Articles — 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 by email on the homepage: persistentengineer.com/#subscribe

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