2025-02 SELECT Insights - Happy New Year

Last updated Feb 23, 2025

Hi there

I hope you’re doing well. I’m here with a late Happy New Year and the first newsletter of 2025 🙄. I hope you started well and have already achieved some of your goals. I didn’t set myself goals this year. Instead, I am doubling down on my Principles. I have firmly believed in them ever since I began using them.

Principles, to me, are the key to living life. Find the right principles for you, align your life accordingly, and make small adjustments. You will be in a better spot in one year and a hugely better spot in two to five years. These kinds of small changes compound over time.

I don’t like to share too many achievements, but I want to gather them in my reflections on the year. Here are two of them:

• My long-term goal and principle of writing every day was to become a full-time author, which I have achieved by freelancing.
• I have 700-1000 daily views on my website ssp.sh 🤯 (200 a day on my Book’s webpage

These were not goals of mine, but an outcome of the principles I follow - in short:

1. Family Freedom
2. Learn something every day
3. Nourish close relationships
4. Stay healthy
5. Be open to new things
6. Minimalistic

By doing that, I couldn’t be happier with my current life. This does not only include the business side; having a great family and support counts, and it wouldn’t be possible without them. Below are more about the recent content and other updates, such as the DuckCon in Amsterdam, and how to focus in a dedicated office or on the go in a coffee shop?

Since my last newsletter, there have been a ton of new articles out. Here is the list of articles on my website:

• Most recent, a personal guide to reclaiming focus in the age of endless temptation:
  • Finding Flow: Escaping Digital Distractions Through Deep Work and Slow Living
• Tools & Best Practices
  • The Data Engineering Toolkit: Essential Tools for Your Machine: Essential data engineering tools
  • Why Pivot Tables Never Die: Pivot tables in modern data analysis
  • BI-as-Code and the New Era of GenBI: Code-first BI approaches
• Declarative Data Stack
  • The Rise of the Declarative Data Stack: Introduction to declarative data approaches
  • Designing a Declarative Data Stack: From Theory to Practice: Implementing declarative principles
• DuckDB
  • 15+ Companies Using DuckDB in Production: A Comprehensive Guide: Production DuckDB case studies
  • The Enterprise Case for DuckDB: 5 Key Categories and Why Use It: DuckDB for enterprise use
• Semantic Layer & BI
  • Exploring the Semantic Layer Through the Lens of MVC: Semantic layers and MVC architecture
  • Universal Semantic Layer: Capabilities, Integrations, and Enterprise Benefits: Enterprise semantic layer deep dive
  • Semantic Layer and AI: The Future of Data Querying with Natural Language: AI-powered natural language querying
• DEDP Book:
  • Updated the state of data engineering for 2024/25
  • The history of managing database changes: Schema Evolution vs. Data Contracts vs. NoSQL has been added too.
  • Next up, and published very soon: Data-Asset Reusability Pattern.

New articles about the never-ending OLAPs and some features related to Geospatial are also in the works. I’ll keep you posted.

Below are some updates from my first ever event since a long time, the books I read, the dedicated office space I’m grappling with, and some updates from BlueSky and Second Brain.

On January 31st, I was in beautiful Amsterdam. I had a wonderful time meeting wonderful people, including a couple I’ve met on the interweb but never personally. Mike Driscoll, Christophe Blefari, Mehdi Ouazza, Julian Hyde, Carlo Piovesan, Burak Kabakci, Tobias Müller and many others.

The highlights, besides meeting friends in real life, were the talks by Mike’s about Introducing a SQL-based metrics layer powered by DuckDB, Rusty about
Airport for DuckDB: Letting DuckDB take Apache Arrow Flights (building extension for DuckDB in Python!) and Christophe Blefari about the smallest DuckDB orchestrator on earth, yato.

Check some impressions on Mehdi’s post.

I just read or am still listening to Stolen Focus, which inspired me to write the above Finding Flow article. And in times of constant distraction and people unable to focus for more than 3 minutes on a sure thing (as to the book), I’m more convinced Reading Books for a Happy Life. It’s the ultimate way of being focused and learning something calmly, without distraction and hype. Not based Never-Ending Now.

• Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey: This book was so real. Matthew read and shares from his 35 years of Journaling and life. So inspiring and straight from the heart. It was interesting and motivating to hear from a Hollywood actor and celebrity what truly matters, family, and keep livin. Alright, aaaalright, alriiight.
• Be Useful Seven Tools for Life by Arnold Schwarzenegger: This audiobook read by Arnold Schwarzenegger himself is one of the best books. It’s super motivating to hear it from him, what he’s done and how he always saw the positive. He also says many times— the more you share the more you get
• Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu): Inspiring to hear the ancient Chinese philosophical text. I found it helpful but repetitive based on what I learned from Stoic books and other deeper practices.
• Stolen Focus and why you can’t pay attention by Johann Hari. I have started this and not finished yet, but the first 10% are astonishing! Inspired me to write a full article about Finding Flow.

As I work independently, I am looking for a dedicated office. My goal is to be more focused in a room where my brain knows there will be only work. I have some images on my Patreon page titled “ The search for a new office”.

Based on the podcast by CGP Grey and his work in 1.5-2h cycles, he goes from coffee places to places. See the discussion on Bluesky #1 and #2. But this and the book above inspired me to write an entire article on Flow and how I usually get into it.

Here are some of the latest Bluesky posts that might interest you. Again, please follow me there as all my thoughts and experiments are exclusively there. Twitter will only be used for the new articles.

Here’s a curated section of interesting Bluesky posts from your recent activity:

• A thoughtful reflection on restrictions as a positive force: Using email instead of Google Docs for feedback, and direct communication for scheduling meetings may seem harder in the moment, but often leads to better outcomes.
• Finding flow and defeating digital distractions has been on my mind lately. When trying to access social media, I use Focus on MacOS and ScreenZen on mobile, which show insightful quotes to help maintain concentration.
• A fascinating exploration of the temporary nature of our worries. Revisiting my brain dump from 3.5 months ago, I noticed many concerns had vanished – a good reminder that most things are temporary.
• Music as a universal remedy: It’s fascinating how profound music can be. Sad? Listen to music. Partying? Listen to music. Focus? Listen to music. Not listening to music for too long always makes me itchy. Music feels like a remedy for the soul.
• A peek into my writing process using Obsidian’s graph view. While some say the graph is just for show, I find it invaluable in the initial phase of writing articles, helping discover patterns and relationships between ideas.
• I explored my thoughts on teaching Vim and how perspectives change: “When I discovered its language-based approach and played around, I felt numb and a little stupid for not learning it earlier. There was a keystroke to get to any position - it felt like moving with surgical precision.”
• A thoughtful exploration of “The Human Factor” in data tools: “A tool is intuitive if we are familiar with it, if it’s simple, if we can control it, and if we trust it. We achieve this through well-defined, built-in constraints, leading to standardization across the board.”
• An interesting perspective on writing and thinking from Leslie Lamport that sparked discussion: “If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.”

Lastly, here are some noteworthy updates from my second brain.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between writing and thinking, expanding my notes on how Writing is the Thinking - a concept that’s become central to my work. This connects beautifully with my exploration of Compounding Note-Taking, where I compare the practice to compound interest - your ideas don’t just add up, they multiply over time. Related, I’ve documented my unique approach to daily notes and how I write them differently than most, focusing on actionable insights rather than just journaling.

On the technical side, I’ve been updating my documentation about Classical Architecture of Data Warehouse and exploring various Data Modeling Techniques and its Data Modeling Languages. It’s fascinating to see how these foundational concepts continue to evolve. For those interested in my process, I’ve also documented my favorite Music that keeps me focused while doing Deep Work.

A significant update to my infrastructure is the refreshed Public Second Brain with Quartz, which aligns perfectly with my philosophy of File Over App - prioritizing control and longevity of our digital content. For collaborative work, I’ve been experimenting with HackMD, think Google Docs for Markdown. And updated Writing Effectively with clear value for readers.

There’s a lot more, but it’s long enough for today. Sorry about that. I’d instead write less often but with some depth. You can skim what happened lately with one email. If you like a different format or more often but shorter, please let me know, too.

Hope you have a great weekend and a good start to the week.
—Simon

PS: I created a Squad on DailyDev about Data Engineering. If you enjoy this, please follow along here.

Origin: Newsletter
References:
Created 2025-02-15