Paul Brabban, Lead Consultant at Equal Experts
With experience in software development, data engineering and machine learning, I specialise in data-intensive problems and decentralised data engineering at scale. My experience extends to leading teams, technical architecture and product development. Find out more about my experience and publications in my portfolio.
Contact me to see how I can help at paul@tempered.works.
Back in early 2024 I tried GitHub Codespaces, and quickly ditched my local dev setup entirely. This post shares my experience going cloud-native for development: benefits for onboarding, agility, and security, alongside the real-world snags like network dependency and unexpected billing quirks.
Does your SQL still copy most of your columns from SELECT after GROUP BY?
Behold: GROUP BY ALL.
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I had big doubts about becoming a consultant or contractor. Could I do it? Would I find work? Could I run my own business? Would I need to change who I am, wear a suit, or buy a briefcase? Seven years have flown by since I took the plunge, so I'm going to share my story in case it's helpful for you!
I believe that making my guest network my default network reduces the potential harm a compromised app or device can cause. What was my "trusted" network is now my "untrusted" network, with only a few low-risk devices that really need local network connectivity connected to it, isolated from other devices that matter like my phone and work laptop.
It's a simple change in how I use my home network, and does not require in-depth knowledge and experience. Having operated this way at home for a few months now, I've found little impact on day-to-day usability, but it's really helped me sleep better at night. I'll explain what I changed, why, and how I've adjusted my wider thinking on my home network security to take better advantage of this approach.
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I'll share how I generate unique identifiers from data in 2025, avoiding the pitfalls I've seen along the way. TL;DR: I'm using MD5 to produce a digest from a string or bytes value, then I'm using plain old hexadecimal encoding of that digest, specifying upper or lowercase for the alpha characters. This solution meets the needs I describe next.
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My AWS bill was higher than I expected, and it wasn't immediately clear what was driving the cost. Here's how I tracked down the culprits.
Whilst I've used and written about UDFs a lot, I can't recall ever having a reason to work with stored procedures. When I was asked how I'd go about wrapping them in automation and testing, I thought it'd be a good excuse to take a look and see how I might go about testing them!
There is more than one way to build a ROW in AWS Athena and the underlying Trino engine. It turns out I was doing it the verbose, brittle and really annoying way. Row subqueries are so much better!
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I noticed failing builds this week, with a dbt-core vulnerability flagged by SafetyCLI as the culprit. There was no actionable information in the command line output, so here's what I found and my action.
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The Oct 15, 2024 update of Google Chrome stable (130.0.6723.58) suddenly broke some sites, such as GitHub Codespaces and 1Password, due to a JavaScript-related setting.