Meta’s legal battles over children using its platforms raise a much bigger question: How does any internet company actually know how old a user is? Most online services ask for a date of birth during signup. But that does not prove anything. A 12-year-old can simply enter
I interact with people every day who talk about data lakes and lakehouses. Within a few minutes, it often becomes clear that they do not fully understand what those terms mean. When someone keeps relying on fancy terminology instead of explaining the underlying idea, it usually means the concept is
Leverage looks attractive when stocks are rising. A stock rises 5%, and a 2× leveraged ETF may rise roughly 10% that day. Investors make money faster without needing twice as much capital. But leverage works exactly the same way in reverse. South Korea recently provided a dramatic example of what
DATA ENGINEERING & ARCHITECTURE Why applying relational database update patterns to cloud lakehouses causes write amplification, high compute costs, and degraded query performance. Apache Iceberg is getting a lot of attention—and for good reason. It brings capabilities such as ACID transactions, snapshot isolation, schema evolution, time travel, and support
Columnar storage formats like Parquet and ORC, and columnar execution engines such as BigQuery, are widely used in analytics systems because they store data column by column on disk instead of row by row. When a query reads only the columns it needs, only those columns are read from disk,
Conversations about data formats often focus on Parquet versus Avro, or columnar versus row-oriented storage. What is discussed less often is the block-based structure that actually enables files to be split and processed in parallel across distributed systems. This article explains that underlying mechanism. A block (e.g.
Own the fire. * When things break, step forward. * Ownership under pressure is what separates engineers from passengers. * Roll up the sleeves * A fix without understanding is just moving the problem somewhere else. Don’t act blindly on someone else’s suggestion. * If it fails, you own the failure. * If it
Bitcoin is down around 50% from its peak, but the more interesting story is not the price. It is the supply. More than 95% of all Bitcoin has already been mined. But here is the strange part: Mining the remaining 5% will take more than 100 years. That sounds wrong
Every device connected to the internet needs an address. That address is called an IP address. The older internet runs primarily on IPv4, a 32-bit addressing system, which provides roughly 4.3 billion possible addresses. When the internet was young, that number sounded massive. Today? It’s nowhere near
About this series This is a five-episode series breaking down the Google Analytics (GA4) ecosystem by service, not by features. Think of it as a short series, not a binge. Each article focuses on one layer of the GA4 pipeline and explains: * What that layer actually does * What decisions
Previous Episode 0: The GA4 Pipeline in One View We’ll start with the first layer (Define) of the pipeline. This is where Google Tag Manager comes into the picture. Imagine you’re a marketer or analyst. Your site already uses GA4, and GTM has been set up once. Now
Previous Episode 1: Define | Google Tag Manager In episode 1, we looked at where events are defined. Now we move to the next step in the pipeline: Send This is the moment data actually leaves your website or app. What “send” means in GA4 Once an event is defined, it