A field journal from the data layer

Twenty years of pipelines. Now, casting data into intelligent products.

Essays, projects, and honest notes from a data engineer’s move into AI-driven product development, by John Ratté, in New Orleans.

Data work AI work Postmortems The trade

Latest writing

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The trade · May 10, 2026

The data consulting pod under AI tooling: what each seat does now

A tour of three seats on a data-platform consulting pod: how we work today, how we are likely to work tomorrow, and what each seat needs to get ready for.

AI work · May 9, 2026

Same Effort, More Mileage

The vendors oversell what AI saves. The skeptics undersell what it ships. Same human effort, materially more output, work that looks different than it used to.

Projects

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project screenshot / demo

castkit

An open-source toolkit for validating LLM outputs against warehouse schemas. Repo + writeup.

talk recording thumbnail

Talk: Pipelines to Products

A 30-minute talk on re-tooling a data platform team for AI product work. Video + slides.

About

Two decades of warehouses, pipelines, and some of the most elaborate data visualizations ever exported to Excel. Typecast is the public record of the shift from moving data to building with it.

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One essay, most weeks. No noise.