Year in Review – 2025

I used to publish a year in review post each year, but it seems I haven’t the past few years. It was much more impressive in years where I would post an article every week. I have spent a lot of time learning the past few years – first about MySQL and now about Snowflake, and that left less time for blogging. I continue to write regularly, but that now means once or twice a month instead of once or twice a week.

Let’s take a look at what I have written this year and the impact I’ve had.

2025 DataGeek Stats

In 2025, I wrote and posted 15 articles, totaling 16,021 words.

I still have a significant readership, with over 71,000 visitors over the course of the year:

My Db2 content still makes up the bulk of views. This is largely because of the sheer bulk of more than 450 Db2-specific posts, and the relative quiet in the Db2 blogging space, as compared to MySQL and Snowflake, where there are many active contributors. My top 10 posts for the year are all Db2-focused:

However, the 14th most-popular article this year was about Snowflake! With 1,209 views, Problematic Query Patterns in Snowflake: Join Explosion was my most popular non-Db2 article. It took me quite a while to develop the graphics in that one, and I’m inordinately proud of it, so this makes me happy!

My readers continue to be international with a heavy focus on the United States and India. Rounding out the top 4 are Germany and China:
China is a bit of a surprise to me – I don’t recall noticing a significant amount of readers there in past years.

Non-DataGeek Content

I’ve also been writing some for work and publishing in official channels. On the Snowflake blog on Medium, I’ve posted 4 articles:

• Introducing the Query Profile
• Data Type Considerations for Join Keys in Snowflake
• The Basics of Joins in Snowflake
• An Example of Choosing a Clustering Key in Snowflake

Articles I publish there have the benefit of the the review of my peers internally, along with time out of my workday to experiment, write, and publish. As a result, they end up with a bit more formal tone and a bit more thought and time put into them.

I was also able to publish a Snowflake Guide (formerly known as QuickStart) titled A Data-Driven Methodology for Choosing a Snowflake Clustering Key. This is another piece of content that I am particularly proud of. It took a couple of months of effort to build the well-vetted demonstration of cluster key selection, to get in-depth peer reviews, and to finally publish it. It takes a bit to work through, but I’ve now worked with several customers who worked through it prior to getting to me, and their questions were thoughtful and detailed – they were able to make the best use of my expertise because they already had discovered and considered the basics.

The final piece of externally-available content I produced this year outside of datageek was contributions to the Performance pillar of Snowflake’s Well-Architected Framework. My portion is towards the end. This was fun because working with performance is so often reactive, and this was a proactive approach to Snowflake performance.

Blogging Next Year

I set the bar high in the first 5-10 years of blogging by actually managing weekly publishing. I don’t expect to get back to that place, but looking at my content creation as a whole last year, I’m pretty prod of it. I’d like to set a reasonable goal for next year of publishing 2 blog entries a year on average. Looking at my plans for the next year, I suspect this may not be evenly distributed throughout the year.

As always, I remain open to guest bloggers, and would be happy to work with those who are interested in a variety of data topics. I find the vast majority of individuals I offer this opportunity to, and who express interest in creating content, never take advantage of it.

How My Career Journey is Going

I continue to absolutely love my job at Snowflake. It is the perfect blend of deep technical work and educating people both inside of Snowflake and outside of Snowflake about performance topics. I continue to be amazed and pleasantly surprised with the pace of change of the product. I have developed a mastery of Snowflake performance, and there are so many different directions to go from here.

I do still struggle with finding the right way to blog about my work without providing fodder for competition or divulging confidential customer information. I feel like I’m finding the balance there, but also struggle with whether a particular topic belongs at work on the official blog or here.

Snowflake continues to be a company I can be proud to work for. There is a lot of change. I’ve had 10 managers in 2.5 years here. Despite all that change I have a solid idea of how I can contribute and the impact that my work has.