Need some more goblins?
DATA GOBLINS CONTENT IN 2023-24
…sharing what I’ve done and some thoughts on some things I’ll do next year.
LOOKING FOR SOME MORE GOBLINS?
If you follow this website, you likely noticed that I’ve published less in 2023 compared to 2022. That’s true, but the reality is that I’ve begun to publish articles in other places. Until now, I chose to not say much about that, here. In this post, I want to bring you up to speed — I’ll share some of what I’ve published elsewhere, and also share my basic plans about what kinds of articles I’ll publish on Data Goblins in 2024.
As is tradition for an end-of-the-year article, this post is more candid and personal than what I’d usually write. If you’re not interested, feel free to pass it up. Keep a look out, for the next article, though — I am currently working on a more objective article that reflects upon the changes and trends we’ve seen in 2023, and what kind of impact or consequences these might create in 2024. These include things from generative AI and Fabric, but also how the line between content/community and product/marketing has been getting uncomfortably thin, lately...
The purpose of this article is twofold:
1. To explain why I've published less on Data Goblins and discuss what I'll publish in 2024.
2. Outline other helpful content I've produced in 2023 and where you can find it.
DATA GOBLINS ARTICLES AND TALKS IN 2023
This year, I’ve shifted my focus in terms of the type and quantity of content I produce. These changes are described below.
LESS CONFERENCES AND TALKS
While I used to speak regularly at EU conferences or Power BI user groups, one realization I had this year was that speaking at conferences cost me more time, money, and energy than I received in return. This was particularly true in 2023, since I became self-employed.
Bonk the business goblin knows this juggle… as do you, too, I imagine.
Furthermore, conferences became nigh impossible with my childcare commitments at home. My wife works in a hospital and is very limited in the time she can take off, so I need to be more available for bebe. My priorities simply shifted this year more toward family. The same goes for user groups, many of which take place during the hours when I’m putting my daughter to bed or taking care of personal affairs on evenings or weekends. That time is for family now… not data stuff.
In 2023-24 I decided to deprioritize giving talks in favor of other activities that I enjoy more and give me more in return. I intend to resume attending more conferences from 2025.
LESS CONTENT ON DATA GOBLINS
Throughout 2022, I posted on average more than 1 article per week here on data-goblins.com. This year, that number dwindled significantly; I now post an average of one article every ~3-4 weeks. There’s a number of reasons for that, including:
Family: My first child, Zoë, was born this year. She’s a lovely little goblin.
Illness: I’ve been symptomatically ill approximately 60% of all days this year. Nothing very serious, but the first time you get kids, you get sick from everything they bring home from daycare. Seriously, I’ve been sick more times in the last 10 months than in the last 5 years before that, without exaggeration.
Personal: Other personal reasons, like moving houses this year, among others.
More content elsewhere: Since this year, I’ve been publishing articles in other places. This has been a great way for me to learn and collaborate with different people.
MORE CONTENT ELSEWHERE
This year, I wrote content that was published, elsewhere. I chose to not share that content via data-goblins.com to separate what I do here from what I do anywhere else. However, I realize that makes it harder to find related content, as I tend to write about common topics; mainly, semantic models, adoption, and design.
Moving forward, I’ll provide a centralized, searchable repository on data-goblins.com for everything I produce, including articles, resources, etc. When I publish a new article elsewhere, a Data Goblins post will briefly summarize and link out to it, so that you know… and this summary won’t be AI-generated. It will also indicate clearly whether I’ve been paid to write the article or not, and how much time I spent on it.
There’s some new goblins in town that’ve been rather busy, lately… but you’ll hear more from them, later.
To bring you up to speed, however, I’ve contributed content in the following places:
I am a co-author of both the Fabric Adoption Roadmap and Power BI Implementation Planning. This has been a tremendously rewarding experience where I’ve learned a lot from colleagues like Matthew Roach, Melissa Coates, and Peter Myers, all of whom I greatly respect and look up to. I write content and design diagrams, the latter of which has been very fulfilling and let me contribute to a wide range of topics and content.
I was the lead author on the following published content this year:
BI Strategy series (4 articles): How to plan and implement a BI strategy. This is the most important thing I’ve ever written; I spent more time writing this than I did on the written portion of my PhD thesis.
Enterprise content publishing usage scenario: Publishing Power BI content with Azure DevOps.
Business alignment: How your data and BI teams can align with your org. and their objectives.
Change management: How to manage and mitigate the impact of change for people.
Usage scenario diagrams: Diagrams showing common ways people use Power BI. You can download these diagrams as scaleable images to print as posters or use in your own community content. However, please include references to where you got the image and who produced it; don’t claim you produced it or use it in your own paid trainings and courses, please… That’s just having decent integrity.
I also contributed to various pieces of content, either through diagrams, designs, reviews, or revisions.
A rambling goblin appears:
Some people have asked why I (or Data Goblins) am not listed as a "contributor" under articles I wrote or contributed to in learn.microsoft.com. That's because "contributors" there only refers to people who modified the article via GitHub. Typically, when we produce content, there's a number of steps that take place before the documentation reaches GitHub for publication on learn.microsoft.com, such as:
- Planning and designing content.
- Drafting articles.
- Reviewing articles with subject matter experts (i.e. architects) or authorities (i.e. legal).
- Creating diagrams, tables, or other, embeddable multimedia content.
Once these things are ready, a team member gathers the final content and submits it as a PR to Microsoft's GitHub in a centralized process. Once there, it's reviewed by third-party vendors before it can be accepted for publication.
These third-party vendors (together with the person who submitted the PR) are the people who end up being named as contributors. Anyone who contributed to the article (even if it was a majority contribution) before it reaches GitHub isn't listed as a "contributor".
That's just how it works. This is something I never used to question, but in the last week alone I've gotten asked about this multiple times, so it's starting to bother me.
I helped produce training for Tabular Editor and publish regular blogposts there, mainly about authoring semantic models. I’ve also occasionally contributed to the Tabular Editor documentation, though not as much as I wanted to, this year.
I was the lead author on the following published content this year:
Tabular Editor enterprise training course: This free course is offered by Tabular Editor to help you learn how to use Tabular Editor 3, effectively, and improve your data modeling skills. It contains videos, practice questions, interactive material, downloadable examples or resources, and more…
The Spaceparts dataset: About a free training resource for learning data concepts and tools.
Using Tabular Editor in Microsoft Fabric: Some thoughts on how semantic models will become more important in Fabric, and how one might effectively use Tabular Editor 3 in that environment.
Semantic models in simple terms: An explanation about what a semantic model is and why it’s useful. This article was intended to cut through the jargon, particularly because I felt that re-naming “datasets” to “semantic models” made it more complicated and confusing for the vast majority of Power BI users.
Gather requirements for semantic models: Key questions and considerations when you’re planning and designing a semantic model for a Fabric or Power BI solution.
I started collecting and distributing some of my re-usable Power BI resources on GitHub. This has been a nice way to share templates and other technical content, but I’ve noticed it’s very inaccessible to layman audiences who aren’t familiar with GitHub. I’m still evaluating whether this is the best path forward for me to share this type of content, or whether I should just centralize everything from my website.
I published the following resources on GitHub:
powerbi-macguyver-toolbox: Visualization templates and other misc. resources to bend and twist Power BI to your will. This repo is largely focused on dataviz and productivity enhancements. This repo contains contributions by Štěpán Rešl.
TabularEditorQuiz: A C# script to play a quiz about Tabular Editor, in Tabular Editor. This was an experiment to get familiar with the different UI options in TE scripting. Fork and modify it if you want to make your own quiz about something else, or create a UI flow for your scripts.
stardew-data-tracking: A C# mod for Stardew Valley to get sample data for working with Power BI and Fabric. This was a small side project to passively generate data while I played a video game.
C# scripts and other snippets (gists): Various one-off submissions that include scripts for things like formatting Power Query in Tabular Editor or even running a custom version of the Snake game.
On top of this, I’ve also produced some hidden, bonus content that’s more artistic in nature, published on this site. This content is either artistic expression or related to my Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Originally, I planned on sharing more D&D-related content, but decided it’s still premature to do so.
The only content from here that’s public is below. Other content is private, restricted to specific groups and audiences for now:
This article has nothing to do with Power BI: A scrollable story about… not Power BI.
Warning: This article deals with mature themes that some may find disturbing.
FUTURE CONTENT ON DATA GOBLINS
In the following accordian menus you can find some high-level information about my content plans for 2024.
In general, you can expect to find original articles here about the following three topics:
Adoption: How to help people use data and data tools effectively to make decisions and take actions. This content will be technology-agnostic and not specific to Power BI.
Design: How to plan and blueprint data solutions effectively. This includes everything from solution planning to literal visual and report design. The core of this content is being effective, efficient, and innovative by employing critical- and design-thinking. It will also typically not be specific to Power BI.
Semantic models: How to design, build, and deploy quality models that fit what you need when you need it. This content will be specific to tabular models and Power BI, but can still be very broad, covering any aspect of a Power BI model.
I don’t plan to write about the following topics:
Generic AI-cenric content: If I discuss AI tools like Copilot or ChatGPT, it will be in the context of solving a specific business or technical problem. Any content about AI tools or technology will be very use-case focused, unless I decide to write about adoption or design challenges for AI tools/technology, itself.
Example of something I won’t write: How Copilot will change everything.
Example of something I will write: How to use Copilot Studio to improve BI solution documentation.
Feature-centric content: I won’t write about a tool or platform simply because it’s new, popular, or encouraged (by anyone). I’ll only write about features if I sincerely believe that they’re helpful to solve a specific, real-world business or technical problem. That’s because I’m not interested in this content.
Example of what I won’t write: What are notebooks in Fabric?
Example of what I will write: How notebooks in Fabric can replace your personal data gateway.
When I write content, it’s important to me that it meets a certain standard. Given the current state of how content is produced and how this space is evolving, I feel it’s important to be explicit about this.
Quality above quantity: It’s imperative for me that the things I write are trustworthy and high-quality. That means that I won’t try to pump out content to optimize SEO, or use AI to generate content to drive traffic. I’ll only publish something if I believe it’s useful or interesting and worth sharing.
Respectful of your time and space: I’ll keep Data Goblins ad-free, forever. No links will have hidden trackers (even for community incentives, like the MVP Program and links to MS Learn…), and I will never try to sell you bullshit.
Transparency in use of AI: None of my text is AI-generated or revised. If I ever were to hypothetically use AI for something in content (like audio or images), I will disclose it at the top of the article, clearly.
Transparency in possible bias: No articles published on Data Goblins are sponsored. If I believe it’s possible my opinion is biased by my personal experiences (i.e. about a product or service), I’ll disclose it clearly in the article.
Transparency in sources and references: Any sources I use when researching articles or work will be disclosed. This includes anything that inspired or triggered an idea, if relevant.
TO CONCLUDE
2023 has been a different kind of year. A difficult year, too, but that’s besides the point.
While I’ve started publishing some content in other places, I’ll still continue to publish regularly on Data Goblins. Moving forward, I’ll ensure that all content I think is helpful for others is easily findable from this site. This includes both original articles published here, and articles published elsewhere, like on Microsoft Docs.
All content will be transparent and human-generated. It’ll also be organized by topic and entry point. That way, if you want to learn about something like gathering requirements, you have a clear path with tips, techniques, and templates.
As for the 2024 and beyond… there’s some big, big plans in the works. However, there’s nothing I can or feel like sharing yet. You can expect ~1 original article per month to appear on data-goblins.com, and regular links that point toward articles, videos, and other content that I’ve published, elsewhere…
The goblins are out of the cage… and off the rails. I can only say that much.
