About

I’m Chris Finlan. I’m the product lead for Data Engineering and Data Science in Microsoft Fabric, including Apache Spark.

I’ve spent a lot of my career on both sides of the technology conversation: building things, helping customers use them, and now helping decide what gets built. That tends to make me interested in the questions a product demo doesn’t answer. Does it perform? Is it reliable? What does it cost? And what happens when a real customer does something nobody anticipated?

What you’ll find here

Mostly Microsoft Fabric, Spark, data engineering, Power BI, paginated reporting, and AI. I like practical walkthroughs and product tradeoffs more than marketing slides. I also write about sports, movies, and random things I find entertaining. Not everything needs to be a data platform discussion.

How I got here

Before my current work in product, I held technical, customer-facing, and pre-sales roles, including work with enterprise customers on Microsoft’s cloud and data platform. Earlier in my career, I built reporting and line-of-business solutions that connected Microsoft technology with SAP data. Those experiences still shape how I think about what makes software useful.

Longtime readers might remember the Datazen era of this blog. That’s part of the story too. I even talked about some of the earlier work on .NET Rocks!. I have a B.A. from Temple University in Philadelphia.

A note on the opinions

I work for Microsoft (#MSFTEmployee), but this is my personal blog. The opinions are my own, and nothing here should be mistaken for an official product announcement, roadmap commitment, or support statement. When I write about products, I try to distinguish documented behavior, observations, and my own judgment.

Looking for a place to start? Try the homepage or browse the Microsoft Fabric articles.