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16 posts
August 13, 2026
Mike has been building apps on Fabric as a backend since January, and he's coining it FAB. The case isn't that you already own Fabric — it's that the workspace identity, git integration, and SQL database remove the wiring you'd otherwise do by hand in Azure.
August 11, 2026
Meagan Longoria's five-stage maturity model for agentic Power BI development gives Mike and Tommy a framework to argue with. They mostly agree — except on the crawl stage, where Mike thinks starting with an MCP server beats starting with a chatbot.
August 6, 2026
Desktop Bridge gives agents a local server to drive Power BI Desktop — reload files, check report state, and take screenshots so the agent can verify its own work. Mike and Tommy agree on the prerequisite: don't use it without skills.
July 28, 2026
A listener watches junior staff prompt their way to DAX they don't understand, and asks how to train them. Mike and Tommy name the three fundamentals they'd require before handing over agentic tooling — and argue the senior's real job is now building the agent that teaches everyone else.
July 23, 2026
AI-written pipelines don't fail the way human-written ones do — no red squiggles, no thrown exceptions, generous comments, and wrong data. Mike and Tommy work through Nikola Ilic's specify, bound, validate framework and what it means for who you let near an agent.
July 9, 2026
A mailbag question about request tracking turns into the clearest description yet of what a working harness contains: skills, agents, organized context, and the ability to talk to other harnesses. Plus Mike hits real Rayfin limitations trying to build a simple forms app.
June 30, 2026
Executives run on hunches and twenty years of experience, and "increase revenue" is too fuzzy to build a report against. Mike and Tommy cover how to get leadership and the BI team speaking the same language — plus Microsoft's new report-authoring skills and a request for an AI folder in semantic models.
June 25, 2026
Part two picks up at the skills and validation layers of Anthropic's analytics stack, and Tommy arrives at a hot take he'll defend: no agentic solution on your Fabric data until governance is in place. Along the way — why perspectives are Power BI's most untapped feature and why Microsoft needs skills for models.
June 23, 2026
Anthropic published how they run self-service analytics internally, and the answer starts with dimensional modeling and a semantic layer — not with the agent. Mike and Tommy read it as validation that everything Power BI professionals already do well is now the thing that makes AI work at all.
June 18, 2026
Agent skills live on your laptop, which is fine until three people on your team each have their own version of the same one. Mike and Tommy work out which skills should be governed, which should stay personal, and why nobody has a good answer yet for measuring whether a skill is any good.
June 16, 2026
If agents write the DAX and the Python, the job shifts from producing code to vetting it — and that makes you a professional reviewer. Mike and Tommy work through what still has to be in your head to review well, and the uncomfortable question of how juniors become seniors when the MCP server is doing the junior's job.
May 15, 2026
In this episode, Mike and Tommy dig into why building the right skills matters for Fabric developers and how that thinking changes what you learn first. They also discuss how to evaluate skill depth, avoid tool-chasing, and create a plan for steady growth.
February 4, 2026
AI is transforming data engineering in two major ways: democratizing who can build data pipelines and creating new skills around trusting and debugging AI systems.
July 26, 2024
Mike and Tommy break down how the Power BI Skills Matrix concept translates to the Fabric era and why skills clarity matters when teams ramp up. They also cover the July 2024 updates for Fabric and Power BI, plus a practical beat-from-the-street on PBIP, GitHub, and publishing.
October 4, 2023
Ep. 255 outlines a practical Power BI skills matrix you can use to measure team capability, spot gaps and single points of failure, and turn vague 'we need a Power BI person' conversations into a clear hiring and training plan.
September 1, 2023
Ep. 246 is a practical guide to spotting the difference between Power BI trivia and real capability: knowledge, understanding, and wisdom—and how to hire for (and build) the kind of judgment that survives messy, real-world projects.