/ Recent content on Alexander Arvidsson Hugo -- gohugo.io en Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/election-day-musings/ Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/election-day-musings/ Democracy asks us to form opinions we can explain and take responsibility for our choices. That requires doing the uncomfortable work of thinking things through. But we&rsquo;re increasingly outsourcing that work to AI, and I&rsquo;m concerned about the cognitive debt building up. When a chatbot tailors an explanation to your uncertainty, the opportunity to influence sits inside the answer you came looking for. No conspiracy required. Just habits we&rsquo;re not examining closely enough, at precisely the wrong time. /posts/hand-says-no/ Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/hand-says-no/ Most organizations have a risk acceptance process on paper. What they actually have is hallway conversations and comment threads that vanish when projects close. When something breaks, everyone reconstructs who knew what from memory, under pressure, with lawyers involved. Aviation solved this problem decades ago with the MEL. The framework forces explicit conditions, named owners, and real expiry dates. Security work has similar machinery. We just let it collect dust while risks drift between teams unowned. /posts/t-sql-tuesday-202/ Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/t-sql-tuesday-202/ Back in 2015, I was debugging a SQL Server cluster that worked perfectly. Except when it didn&rsquo;t. Connections timed out randomly, failovers failed silently, and nothing made sense. I was sure it was DNS. It was DNS. But that wasn&rsquo;t the real problem. The real problem was me, seeing exactly what I expected to see instead of what was actually there. Turns out, pilots and DBAs have something important in common: expectation bias can really mess you up. /posts/pulling-the-lever/ Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/pulling-the-lever/ You did the hard work. Found the buried metric, rebuilt the report, put the lever in the top-left tile. The meeting went beautifully. Everyone nodded. Then nothing changed. Here&rsquo;s what I keep relearning: a lever is not a mechanism. It&rsquo;s a person with a calendar, a bonus structure, and reasons to leave things exactly as they are. Most reports die in the gap between who requested them and who has to work differently on Monday. /posts/finding-the-lever/ Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/finding-the-lever/ Every student pilot learns this the hard way: staring at the altimeter won&rsquo;t fix your altitude. It&rsquo;s a readout, not a control. Your dashboards have the same problem. Most of the metrics sitting at top left are gauges, things people can only watch. The actual levers, the numbers someone could move on Monday morning, are buried three clicks deep rendered in grey font. Three questions tell you which is which. The answer is usually uncomfortable. /posts/ontology-ownership/ Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/ontology-ownership/ Software versioning is solved. Ontology versioning isn&rsquo;t. When you change what counts as an &lsquo;active customer,&rsquo; that&rsquo;s not a schema migration with a clear notion of correctness. It&rsquo;s a contested definition where reasonable people can land in different places. Fabric IQ gives you the artifact, but it doesn&rsquo;t ship the governance workflow. That part you build yourself. This post digs into what running layered ontologies actually takes, and why the organizational problem matters more than the technical one. /posts/ontology-drift/ Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/ontology-drift/ A sharp LinkedIn critique argues declared ontologies are broken by design. Model your business formally, and by the time you&rsquo;re done, it&rsquo;s already changed underneath you. The proposed fix: let structure emerge from data instead of declaring it upfront. It&rsquo;s a compelling pitch, but I think it misdiagnoses the problem. Ontology drift isn&rsquo;t evidence that formalization failed. It&rsquo;s evidence we failed to separate what should be stable from what shouldn&rsquo;t. The real answer might be simpler than either camp admits. /posts/rituals-part-2/ Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/rituals-part-2/ I said my rituals are for me, not the audience. That&rsquo;s technically true. But a ritual that changes your internal state doesn&rsquo;t keep that change contained. It shows up in your posture, your pace, whether your eyes land on people or drift past them. When your body says one thing while your words say another, the audience isn&rsquo;t hearing confidence. They&rsquo;re hearing the gap. That costs you trust and attention, and the science on why got interesting. /posts/sycophant-reviewing-the-sycophant/ Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/sycophant-reviewing-the-sycophant/ You built the pipeline everyone recommends. One model drafts, another reviews. Two sets of eyes. Except your reviewer is a language model, and language models can be argued out of a position by nothing more than a confident counter-argument. No payload to catch. No injection required. Just a wrong document in your retrieval set making a fluent case. The verdict flips, the badge says &lsquo;reviewed,&rsquo; and everyone downstream stops looking. You added a laundering step. /posts/the-library/ Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/the-library/ My Data Platform MVP renewed for another year, nearly a decade now. I should feel celebratory. Mostly I feel like I owe somebody money. Because none of it was mine to begin with. Every door was opened by someone who didn&rsquo;t have to. But the compact that built this community, where you give it away and trust it comes back around, I&rsquo;m not sure it holds anymore. We built the library. Someone else started charging admission. /posts/regex-good-argument/ Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/regex-good-argument/ I spent the winter teaching people to defend against prompt injection. Layer your defenses, I said, and you can ship systems you trust. I still believe that. But I found an attack that walks through every layer I described, and it has no payload at all. It is just an argument. You push back on the model&rsquo;s conclusion with confidence, and it folds. Every time. No guardrail fires because no guardrail was watching the conclusion itself. That changes things. /posts/meaning-to-machine/ Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/meaning-to-machine/ We&rsquo;ve spent years encoding business knowledge into Power BI semantic models. What a customer is, what revenue means. The problem is that knowledge is locked in DAX, invisible to AI agents. Fabric IQ introduces ontologies as the fix, a layer that captures meaning in a form machines can reason against. But generating an ontology from your existing semantic model inherits all its limitations. The real question is whether organisations will do the hard work of agreeing on definitions. /posts/map-is-not-the-territory/ Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/map-is-not-the-territory/ For years I thought dimensional models were about organizing data and making queries fast. That&rsquo;s true, but it&rsquo;s profoundly incomplete. Dimensional models describe how we store facts. They don&rsquo;t describe what those facts mean. That gap shows up the moment someone asks a question your star schema wasn&rsquo;t designed for. Ontologies solve a different problem: formal, machine-readable definitions of business concepts and their relationships. With Microsoft now shipping Fabric IQ, this conversation isn&rsquo;t academic anymore. /posts/not-disagreeing-enough/ Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/not-disagreeing-enough/ Describe your chosen architecture to your AI assistant and ask what it thinks. Odds are, it&rsquo;ll tell you the approach is sound. But a 2025 Stanford study found AI models affirm users 47% more than humans do, even when the user is clearly wrong. Worse: people who got sycophantic responses trusted the AI more and were more likely to return. The version that damaged their judgment was the one they liked best. This is Goodhart&rsquo;s Law in your feedback loop. /posts/neurodiversity-and-llms-2/ Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/neurodiversity-and-llms-2/ Your AI policy was written for someone who doesn&rsquo;t work on your team.Your AI policy was written for someone who doesn&rsquo;t work on your team. Probably for someone who doesn&rsquo;t exist. Part 2 of this series moves from research to practice. The key variable isn&rsquo;t cognitive profile — it&rsquo;s domain expertise asymmetry. Where that gap is largest, the agreement machine runs without a check. This post covers where the real risk concentrates, why structured review consistently outperforms &lsquo;does anyone see any problems?&rsquo;, and what a policy that actually changes behaviour looks like. Design the workflow. Not the person. /posts/t-sql-tuesday-199/ Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/t-sql-tuesday-199/ There&rsquo;s a fundamental difference between cloud and on-prem work that I keep coming back to. Cloud is a sophisticated model kit with pre-designed pieces that snap together. On-prem was a pile of Lego bricks and a problem to solve. Everything in between was yours to figure out. If I had to go back tomorrow, I know exactly what skill would need the most work. It&rsquo;s not the technical stuff you&rsquo;d guess. It&rsquo;s something more fundamental, something that years of managed services have slowly let atrophy. /posts/neurodiversity-and-llms/ Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/neurodiversity-and-llms/ Your brain evolved to detect lions. Now it may fire every time you open ChatGPT. This post unpacks three reasons LLMs are not neutral tools — what they&rsquo;re trained on, how RLHF creates systematic pressure toward validation, and what your neurobiology does with the result. Then it gets specific: the same sycophantic system creates meaningfully different failure modes depending on who is using it. Nobody designed this. Nobody fully planned for it. And most deployment practices still aren&rsquo;t accounting for it. The research is early. The mechanisms are not. /posts/data-point-prague-2026/ Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/data-point-prague-2026/ This week I&rsquo;m heading to Prague for DataPoint, organized by my friend Štěpán Rešl, a man whose brain capacity I genuinely cannot account for. Quick trip: arrive Thursday, deliver my data literacy session Friday morning, fly straight home. No time to explore the city, which I&rsquo;ve been promised is beautiful. I can confirm the food is extraordinary. I&rsquo;ve been thinking about one particular meal since 2019. New post on what I&rsquo;m delivering and why the topic still matters. /posts/whiplash-effect/ Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/whiplash-effect/ Data sovereignty concerns - driven by the CLOUD Act and NIS2 obligations - are pushing Swedish organizations to reconsider on-premises analytics. The problem: a decade of cloud adoption has quietly eroded the skills needed to execute on-prem projects. The Microsoft stack in 2026 is more capable than most assume, but lacks a Fabric equivalent. The real decision is operational ownership, not technology preference. Organizations that can reason across the full cloud-to-on-prem spectrum will navigate the uncertainty best. /posts/eating-the-seed-corn-2/ Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/eating-the-seed-corn-2/ The tech industry is cutting junior roles at record pace, calling it AI efficiency. But here&rsquo;s the problem: you can&rsquo;t skip a generation of practitioners and expect institutional knowledge to survive. The seniors who remain were once juniors who had space to build understanding from the ground up. That pipeline is being shut off. Part 2 is about what to do about it. How to mentor like you prompt. How to train for reasoning, not just execution - and why this might be the best time to hire juniors, not the worst. /posts/eating-the-seed-corn-1/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/eating-the-seed-corn-1/ A Wharton study put 1,372 people in front of a deliberately wrong AI. 73% followed it anyway. Not from carelessness - from fluency, confidence, and the absence of a trained skeptical reflex. We built that gap ourselves: ten years of certifications that taught procedure and skipped judgment. Now the procedures belong to agents, and the engineers we trained have no independent model to cross-check against. This is about what we teach instead - and why broken things are the best place to start. /posts/drawing-the-line/ Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/drawing-the-line/ Most speakers spend weeks building a presentation and zero minutes thinking about how to end it. Then they hand the microphone to the audience and call it a close. That&rsquo;s not a close - it&rsquo;s an abdication. The serial position effect means your ending is the thing most likely to survive in memory. This post breaks down why Q&amp;A endings undermine you, why stories work at a neurological level, and what the research actually recommends instead. /posts/sqlbits-2026/ Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/sqlbits-2026/ SQLBits is in Newport, Wales this year - a place that requires actual planning to reach, and a useful reminder that modern travel infrastructure is more remarkable than we give it credit for. I&rsquo;m delivering two sessions: a workshop on data communication with Valerie Junk, covering why insights fail to drive action and what to do about it, and a Fabric FinOps session on what Microsoft Fabric workloads actually cost when you measure outcomes, not just Capacity Units. /posts/nothing-gets-deleted/ Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/nothing-gets-deleted/ You can delete a post. You can unpublish an article. You can invoke GDPR and demand erasure. What you cannot do is remove something from an LLM. Once data dissolves into billions of model weights, there&rsquo;s no row to delete, no file to erase. And it gets worse: the models now training on AI-generated outputs are degrading with each generation, narrowing toward a statistical echo of themselves. The right to be forgotten has no technical implementation path. None. /posts/goodharts-law/ Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/goodharts-law/ Goodhart&rsquo;s Law - when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure - is quietly undermining data strategies everywhere. Support tickets get closed without being solved. Active users log in and leave. Velocity numbers climb while codebases rot. The problem isn&rsquo;t bad metrics; it&rsquo;s the assumption that better metrics fix the underlying issue. The real question to ask before deploying any KPI: if we optimize for this, what will break? /posts/more-speed-more-pain/ Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/more-speed-more-pain/ AI tools force knowledge workers into constant task-switching that neuroscience proves is cognitively expensive. Only 2.5% of people can effectively multitask, yet we&rsquo;re asking everyone to perform like fighter pilots without selection or training. Berkeley researchers found workers experienced burnout as managers consumed efficiency gains with increased assignments—repeating the Jevons Paradox from the telegraph and typewriter eras. Organizations measure output volume while ignoring cognitive sustainability, creating hidden supervisory labor that extracts maximum throughput regardless of cost. /posts/other-side-of-the-world/ Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/other-side-of-the-world/ I&rsquo;m in Redmond this week for the Microsoft MVP Summit - 4000 MVPs, 83 buildings across 500 acres, and not a single roadmap leak to share. The summit is NDA-covered, but that was never the point anyway. The most valuable thing you can do here isn&rsquo;t sit in a preview session. It&rsquo;s finding the engineer whose documentation you&rsquo;ve been reading for years, buy them a terrible American coffee, and ask the question that doesn&rsquo;t fit in a support ticket. /posts/nondeterminism-part-2/ Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/nondeterminism-part-2/ Non-determinism in LLMs isn&rsquo;t a bug to fix - it&rsquo;s a parameter to control. But most teams are tuning the wrong things: obsessing over temperature settings while ignoring the architectural choices that actually matter. Structured outputs, deterministic skills for calculations, plan-then-execute agent patterns, retrieval logging - these are what separate systems you can trust from ones that roll dice in production. The goal was never a deterministic LLM. It was knowing exactly where randomness is allowed to live. /posts/a-new-pattern/ Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/a-new-pattern/ Power BI User Days in Utrecht has something most events don&rsquo;t - soul. But beyond the atmosphere, something more interesting is happening: attendees are no longer asking how to build things. They&rsquo;re asking why, and when, and whether. A maturing community, combined with LLMs absorbing the basic how-to questions, is shifting the conversation toward applied thinking. It&rsquo;s the shift I&rsquo;ve been waiting for. Utrecht suggests the appetite is finally there. /posts/one-hundred-hours/ Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/one-hundred-hours/ For every hour on stage, a hundred hours of preparation. That ratio stopped feeling like a personal failing when the blog became part of the process — not as a publishing platform, but as a thinking tool. A post forces the argument into shape before the slides exist. If the logic holds on the page, it&rsquo;ll hold on the stage. If it doesn&rsquo;t, better to find out now than in front of a sold-out room in Utrecht. /posts/nondeterminism-part-1/ Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/nondeterminism-part-1/ Non-determinism in LLMs creates real operational problems: flaky tests, irreproducible bugs, compliance nightmares, and unreliable agents. Most people only know about token sampling, but randomness creeps in across six distinct layers—from floating-point variance to hidden system prompts. Temperature=0 and random seeds help less than you&rsquo;d hope because they constrain token selection, not reasoning paths. The solution requires structural constraints, not parameter tuning. Until then, you&rsquo;re rolling dice in production. /posts/speaking-userdays-2026/ Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/speaking-userdays-2026/ <p>One of the most difficult events to get into for me has always been the Power BI Gebruikersdagen - a.k.a the Dutch Power BI User Days. I&rsquo;ve always held it in very high regard, and I never stopped submitting in the hopes of one getting to speak. Last year I was invited to deliver a half-day session on presentation skills and a normal one-hour long session on data modeling. I had a blast.</p> /posts/the-tracker/ Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/the-tracker/ Using Claude Code, I built a full-stack application to replace Microsoft Access - without being a developer or understanding React, TypeScript, or Node.js. LLM-assisted coding enables rapid prototyping and bridges the gap between business requirements and technical implementation, but like flight simulators, it doesn&rsquo;t make non-developers into developers. The parallel matters: functional prototypes aren&rsquo;t production-ready systems, and knowing the difference requires actual expertise. /posts/fighting-the-unfixable/ Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/fighting-the-unfixable/ Prompt injection is architecturally unfixable in current LLMs, but defense-in-depth works. Training-time defenses like Instruction Hierarchy, inference-time techniques like Spotlighting, and architectural isolation create practical systems. Microsoft&rsquo;s LLMail-Inject showed thatadaptive attacks succeed at 32% against single defenses, 0% against layered approaches. Real failures like GitHub Actions compromise prove that securing obvious surfaces isn&rsquo;t enough. Like SQL injection, it&rsquo;s manageable with layering. /posts/the-next-chapter/ Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/the-next-chapter/ I&rsquo;m joining Advania as Lead Data Transformation Architect to build their data practice into something coherent. One of Sweden&rsquo;s largest MSPs, Advania needs technical foundations that enable real analytics and AI - not just data theater. I&rsquo;ll lead their direction across Microsoft Fabric, the Azure Data Platform, and hybrid solutions - from feasibility through implementation. The opportunity is building a fresh structure rather than retrofitting onto legacy decisions. This is walking toward work that matters. /posts/speaking-fabfeb-2026/ Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/speaking-fabfeb-2026/ The promise of #SNÆCKS trumps the cold and darkness of Oslo in February. Speaking at the third annual Fabric February promises to be a blast just like 2025! /posts/instructions-as-data/ Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/instructions-as-data/ LLMs fundamentally cannot distinguish between instructions and data. Whether you&rsquo;re building RAG systems, connecting MCP servers to your data platform, or just using AI tools with sensitive information, every retrieved document is a potential instruction override. The Wall Street Journal just proved this by watching Claude lose over $1,000 running a vending machine after journalists convinced it to give everything away for free. /posts/amateur-orchestra-2/ Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/amateur-orchestra-2/ Knowing what&rsquo;s broken is easy - fixing it requires understanding your domain, imagination to form hypotheses, and courage to act. Most data initiatives fail not because the analysis was wrong, but because nobody owned the outcome or knew what to do next. Reports aren&rsquo;t neutral information: they&rsquo;re persuasion. Before collecting data, ask: what decision does this inform? Use &lsquo;data contracts&rsquo; to enforce discipline. The Portsmouth Sinfonia had instruments but couldn&rsquo;t make music. You have data. Can you drive decisions? /posts/amateur-orchestra-1/ Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/amateur-orchestra-1/ The famous beer-and-diapers data mining story? Never happened. Most &lsquo;data-driven&rsquo; companies are just data-decorated, exploring dashboards without hypotheses or action plans. Netflix, UPS, and Capital One succeeded because they started with clear hypotheses about what drives outcomes, then collected data to test them. You don&rsquo;t explore a violin to see what noises it makes - you decide what piece to play. Are you playing instruments or making music? /posts/2025-in-review/ Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/2025-in-review/ Walking away from Knee-Deep in Tech and Data Masterminds brought relief instead of grief - a signal I&rsquo;d been ignoring for too long. From running my first 5K to confronting how organizations prefer data theater over insight, 2025 taught me that outdated identity narratives are self-reinforcing through identity protection: our brains maintain coherence over accuracy. Learn why the stories we tell about who we are become data points, not destiny, and what &lsquo;walking toward what matters&rsquo; means in practice for 2026. /posts/how-llms-work/ Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/how-llms-work/ You think ChatGPT is &rsquo;thinking&rsquo;? It&rsquo;s rolling dice, one token at a time. LLMs don&rsquo;t plan, reason, or understand: they sample from probability distributions based on statistical patterns. Worse, if you&rsquo;re working in Swedish, Arabic, or most non-English languages, you&rsquo;re getting a fundamentally degraded product due to tokenization bias. And as these models increasingly train on their own outputs, they&rsquo;re collapsing into irreversible mediocrity. Understanding what&rsquo;s actually happening changes everything. /posts/turbo-charged-abacus-2/ Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/turbo-charged-abacus-2/ Research shows measurable cognitive decline after just four months of LLM use. Like GPS destroyed our spatial navigation abilities, AI is atrophying our thinking. Here&rsquo;s what the science reveals, the warning signs you&rsquo;re in too deep, why organizations should be terrified, and what we can do about it. /posts/turbo-charged-abacus-1/ Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/turbo-charged-abacus-1/ LLMs are sophisticated pattern-matching engines, not thinking machines. Our hardwired tendency to anthropomorphize combined with dopamine-driven addiction pathways is changing how we interact with these tools. Understanding what they actually are is the first step to using them wisely. /posts/on-rituals/ Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/on-rituals/ From Michael Jordan&rsquo;s lucky shorts to my pre-talk routines: rituals help performers access their best state. While &lsquo;power posing&rsquo; science failed, the psychology of consistent pre-performance routines holds up. Discover why rituals work, how they create mental anchors, and the three specific rituals that help me deliver better presentations. /posts/tooth-fairy/ Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/tooth-fairy/ Sugar went from luxury to ubiquitous poison before we understood what it was doing to us. We&rsquo;re doing the exact same thing with AI, adding it to everything without genuine use cases, while it erodes literacy and critical thinking. By the time we realize what we&rsquo;ve lost, the infrastructure will already be built. /posts/simplified-neuroscience/ Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/simplified-neuroscience/ The &lsquo;Angel&rsquo;s Cocktail&rsquo; story about releasing hormones through storytelling is popular, but the real mechanisms are richer and more useful. Learn what&rsquo;s actually happening when you hook your audience—and how understanding attention, memory, and cognitive tension makes you a better speaker. /posts/speaking-in-budapest/ Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/speaking-in-budapest/ A new city, a new country, and a new session - so many firsts in Hungary! /posts/resurrecting-untruthful-art/ Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/resurrecting-untruthful-art/ &lsquo;The Untruthful Art&rsquo; is back for 2025, completely revamped for our AI-driven misinformation era. With 59% of shared links never clicked and AI presenting statistical hallucinations as facts, data literacy has never been more critical. I&rsquo;m updating with modern examples: AI benchmarks, social media dynamics, election polling, and climate data manipulation. /posts/setting-the-hook/ Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/setting-the-hook/ The &lsquo;30-second rule&rsquo; for presentations is based on a misunderstood study, but the principle of starting strong still matters. Learn why leading with credentials fails, how to open with value instead, and why I memorize every word of my first five minutes. /posts/resurrecting-the-blog/ Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/resurrecting-the-blog/ It is time to resurrect the blog, almost exactly 10 years after its inception. /posts/focus-on-what-matters/ Fri, 30 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/focus-on-what-matters/ Southwest Airlines&rsquo; December scheduling collapse exposed the dangers of deprioritizing both people and technical debt, as 90s-era systems designed for 300 daily operations failed under 20,000+ operations following a leadership shift from operational focus to profit-driven management. /posts/fighting-dotnet/ Wed, 28 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/fighting-dotnet/ Encountered cryptic NuGet package errors while setting up a .NET test environment. The fix: remind NuGet where to find packages by re-adding the source with dotnet nuget add source. A simple solution to a confusing problem. /posts/retiring-a-session/ Thu, 29 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/retiring-a-session/ Retiring my most successful session after 20 presentations. Not because it failed, but because it exploded beyond what one session can hold. Splitting the original &lsquo;The Untruthful Art&rsquo; into multiple new talks, with the final bow at DataMinds Connect in October. /posts/confspeak/ Sun, 20 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/confspeak/ Conferences aren&rsquo;t the party most people think they are. The hidden reality: spending 10-100 hours preparing a single session, the mental exhaustion of networking, and why professional conferences are about career growth, not celebration. /posts/speaking-summit-bits/ Wed, 02 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/speaking-summit-bits/ One virtual session at Global Power BI Summit, then straight to the airport for SQLBits in London. Two talks, three countries, five days. The European data conference scene doesn&rsquo;t stop, and neither do I this week! /posts/speaking-dataminds-2021/ Fri, 09 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/speaking-dataminds-2021/ Pandemic killed 2020&rsquo;s plans. Now finally back on stage at DataMinds Connect in Belgium with a new session on something technical speakers ignore: emotions. First in-person conference travel since the world stopped. I&rsquo;m so ready to teach again! /posts/on-community-again/ Thu, 22 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/on-community-again/ Years ago, fear kept me silent about bad actors in tech. Now stepping away from Data Weekender after organizers kept a speaker with documented harmful behavior. Safety demands action, not just codes of conduct. No longer afraid to speak out. /posts/t-sql-tuesday-135/ Tue, 09 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/t-sql-tuesday-135/ Survived a year of remote work with three essential tools: OBS for presentations that don&rsquo;t bore people to death, Hugo to escape WordPress hell, and a Kindle that keeps me sane when screens become too much. /posts/live-demos/ Fri, 22 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/live-demos/ Live demos waste time at conferences. After 20+ years training, I&rsquo;ve learned that controlled, pre-crafted demonstrations teach better than live coding. Can&rsquo;t zoom, highlight, or control pacing when coding live. My job is helping you learn, not showing off. /posts/t-sql-tuesday-134/ Tue, 12 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/t-sql-tuesday-134/ Built a full-size R2D2 from scratch. Learned CNC machining and wood inlays. Got back in a glider cockpit after 16 years away. How I&rsquo;m staying sane: making things with my hands and flying when my mind needs grounding. /posts/data-platform-discovery-day/ Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/data-platform-discovery-day/ <p>I just had an absolute blast presenting at the Data Platform Discovery Days - both the European and the US edition! For the US edition I presented &ldquo;Azure Machine Learning for the Absolute Beginner&rdquo;, a session looking at machine learning in general, walking through Azure Machine Learning and giving several examples of machine learning in action - in both expected and unexpected places! The European edition asked for &ldquo;Building an Empire - Implementing Power BI Step by Step&rdquo;, a session on Power BI, datasets and dataflows. </p> /posts/mostunexpected/ Sat, 06 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/mostunexpected/ After an exceptional year of speaking internationally and contributing to the community, an unexpected email brought news. The recognition marks a journey from being intimidated by MVPs at a first PASS Summit to becoming one, with a mission to continue mentoring and sharing knowledge. /posts/going-to-unexpected-places/ Fri, 04 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/going-to-unexpected-places/ Woke up in Tel Aviv after speaking to a room that went from two people to 40 in minutes. From a small Swedish town to seven countries this year — never expected databases would take me this far. /about/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /about/ <h2 class="relative group"><strong>Hey there and welcome! I am Alexander.</strong> <div id="hey-there-and-welcome-i-am-alexander" class="anchor"></div> <span class="absolute top-0 w-6 transition-opacity opacity-0 -start-6 not-prose group-hover:opacity-100 select-none"> <a class="text-primary-300 dark:text-neutral-700 !no-underline" href="#hey-there-and-welcome-i-am-alexander" aria-label="Anchor">#</a> </span> </h2> <p>Data only inspires change when it matters to your audience and stakeholders. That&rsquo;s where this blog comes in.</p> /speaking/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /speaking/ <p>Here are my upcoming and past speaking engagements with relevant links to slide decks and demos. At the bottom of the page is my speaker bio and the sessions I have ready to go. If you would like me to speak at your event, don’t hesitate to contact me!</p>