breathing underwater
welcome to volume one, please take off your shoes and put on a pair of the provided slippers
Rise up, then. Mend your ways, start seeing what you are instead of calculating what you should become.
— Franz Kafka, from a 1916 diary entry
“Desire, I want to turn into you.”
— Caroline Polachek, Welcome to My Island, 2023
What is it to find what’s there without perpetual becoming? How is it that nature resolves the balance between control and decentralization that leave us forever in tension?
The data ecosystem is poised to exhale. Press play and let’s take a breath together.
In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,
I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.
In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,
I will honor all life
—wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell—on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.— Diane Ackerman, from I Praise My Destroyer
Can we trade our chrome stamped shapes for carving stone? Can we infuse data with spice and scent? Can we stop imposing shape and start uncovering it? In a world where asking a question to data is cheap, is the craft of analysis even more valuable for its humanity?
Exercise
Draw a chart by hand of a type you’ve never seen before. Make it about something you wish to change about yourself. Bury it in a houseplant.
The ability to attach creates space to detach.
Bring your tent and camp at your data’s natural habitat.
Puffin
## Beliefs
- Nothing beats SQL because nothing can beat maths
- The public cloud is the only truly elastic platform
- Arrow × DuckDB × Iceberg are game changers
- Edge-Driven Data Integration is the way forward
- Clientless + Serverless = Goodness
## Built for data mesh
Most SQL engines are designed as standalone data silos. Instead, PuffinDB embraces the data mesh philosophy, and is natively designed to distribute SQL queries across heterogeneous and remote databases and applications, thanks to its extensive collection of database and application connectors, and its built-in data pipeline execution engine.
We’ve spent a decade caretaking the Library of Alexandria. Now that it’s burning can we learn new magics? Can we become librarians of the trees and insects and flowers and stars?
We use water metaphors but seem to care little for the real ways of water. Instead of towering glaciers, can our warmth help us form rivers, together?
Exercise
Locate an area of tension in your back-body. Imagine gratitude trickling down into the space, filling it with water. What temperature is the water? Is it warm and turquoise? Cool and deep midnight? Let the tension soak into the water, then imagine it draining down into the Earth. The Earth is nourished by this gift.
Governance is not disembodied in spite of its illusions. Who is governing the data and why?
What if the entire organism deeply understood a single need?
Metrics are an astrology of desire.
Go forth to what’s necessary and love it. Leave what’s not where it is.
Thank you for coming to volume one. Really hope you enjoyed your exploration. You can pick your shoes up on the way out.
always with love,
winnie