Field notes from the workbench.
Observations, questions, failures, and ideas captured while building systems.
- JUNE 22, 2026
Finance doesn't need more dashboards. It needs fewer versions of the truth.
Every workbook I opened told a slightly different story. Different mappings. Different calculations. Different assumptions. The engine wasn't designed to build another report, it was designed to make everyone start from the same financial reality.
OBSERVATION - JUNE 19, 2026
A semantic model is organizational memory.
People leave. Excel files change. Report layouts evolve. A well designed semantic model preserves how the business thinks, so every dashboard speaks the same language regardless of who builds it.
ARCHITECTURE - JUN 21, 2026
The hardest part wasn't the code.
I spent twelve hours writing PowerShell. That wasn't the difficult part (though I mainly code in python). The difficult part was understanding how planners actually think.
BUILD NOTE - JUNE 18, 2026
Dashboards answer questions. Decision systems choose the next question.
I realized somewhere along this project that I had stopped trying to build better dashboards. I was trying to build better decisions.
OBSERVATION - JUNE 13, 2026
Finance has the same challenge as procurement.
Different reports. Different KPIs. Same problem. People spend more time finding the answer than acting on it.
INSIGHT - JUNE 10, 2026
A planner's attention is finite.
The scarce resource isn't inventory. It isn't money. It isn't data. It's attention. Every decision system should respect that.
LESSON - JUNE 08, 2026
Every override is training data.
When someone ignores the recommendation, they aren't breaking the model. They're teaching it.
RESEARCH NOTE - MAY 24, 2026
Power BI isn't the product.
For a while I thought the dashboard was what I was building. It wasn't. The dashboard is just where the decision appears.
OBSERVATION