👋 Hey there! I'm TJ. I write about data products, technology, software, and economics.
I'm a husband and father, living in Singapore, and from the Philippines. I explore data engineering and accounting at Titanium Birch.
#8: Writing is thinking, weak passport problems, and economic growth
No amount of organising beats writing when it comes to synthesising new information
I consume a lot of media. On a regular day, my feed reader pushes the latest gadget reviews from The Verge, updates on Southeast Asia from Dari Mulut Ke Mulut, or my Kindle asks me to finish reading The Montessori Toddler, along with all the other books in my ever-growing reading list.
I tell myself that this isn’t mindless consumption. I imagine myself quoting a book I read 2 years ago, or relating some tidbit in a newsletter to a problem I’m facing at work, or applying some sage parenting advice while playing with my daughter.
This wasn’t really happening, though. There was something missing in the process — I wasn’t taking the time to coalesce my thoughts from amorphous human brain file format to concrete written prose. Worse, the more time I spent without writing anything, the more I tried to keep things in my head, taking up cycles and leaving me scatterbrained.
3 ways to connect to a homelab
I bought an M1 Mac Mini (configured with additional RAM), and figured that it would be a great homelab for occasional use and tinkering. It would also open me up to enabling a primarily local instead of cloud-based smart home using Home Assistant.
My homelab has been great at allowing me to remove subscriptions for seldom-used cloud services. (Image by ChatGPT 4o)
I was evaluating an investment in HSBC’s AT1 perpetual bond — I was worried about a situation similar to Credit Suisse, where AT1 bonds were wiped out, but equity holders were paid.
ChatGPT’s o1 model did reasonably well in guiding me through. (Note: Not investment advice.)
dbt Singapore meetup: Using dbt for accounting and investment reporting
I’ve always believed that there is still a lot of value in tackling bread and butter reporting using the modern stack of data tools. One of the most valuable and important reporting workflows in any business isn’t in the marketing, product, or engineering teams - it’s in the finance team.
Reporting on the financial performance and health of companies and investments is usually done by large teams exerting a large amount of elbow grease. By leveraging dbt in our firm’s accounting and investment reporting, we were able to deliver both accounting and investment reporting on a daily basis and in an automated fashion.
The presentation was intended to give an overview of what dbt users who are tackling similar challenges could face and what worked best for us in overcoming those challenges.
We also wrote about this talk on the Titanium Birch blog.