Hey, I'm Carlos.
I'm a Data and Analytics Engineer based in Porto, Portugal - currently working as a Microsoft Fabric Practice Lead at Devoteam, and writing here about the things I spend most of my time thinking about: data engineering, analytics engineering, and modern cloud platforms.
This blog exists because I kept having the same conversations over and over on client projects. About why data quality gets skipped. About how to actually structure a Medallion architecture (or similar) that people trust. About what tools are worth the hype and what aren't. At some point it made more sense to write it down properly than to repeat myself in Slack threads.
Where I'm coming from
I started in data in 2013 as a Junior BI Consultant - classic stack, SQL Server, SSIS, SSAS cubes, IBM Cognos, Kimball star schemas. The kind of work where you learned to care about data modelling properly because if you didn't, the cube would just be wrong and everyone would know it.
From there I moved into Oracle Retail consulting, which took me to Dublin and Cape Town for nearly two years. Working on-site internationally in a complex ERP environment taught me a lot about how enterprises actually manage data - which is to say, with a lot of legacy, a lot of tribal knowledge, and usually more risk than anyone is comfortable admitting.
Then 2020 happened, and I came back to data engineering - this time on Google Cloud. BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Airflow, dbt, Great Expectations, Looker, Terraform. I spent four years building and leading cloud-native data platforms at Devoteam, working across retail and other industries, leading teams, running architecture reviews, and dealing with the full range of problems that come up when you are trying to turn raw data into something a business can actually trust.
In 2024 I moved to Amsterdam, still at Devoteam, fully focused on GCP - BigQuery, dbt, Looker. Same stack, different clients and culture, same problems.
When I came back to Portugal at the end of 2025, everything changed. I was introduced to Microsoft Fabric and accepted the challenge to become Microsoft Fabric Practice Lead - a new platform, a new bet, surprisingly one of the most interesting decisions I have made in my career so far. New platform, same fundamental problems. A lot of the lessons from years of GCP work are directly applicable - sometimes in "this is how Fabric does the same thing differently" ways, and sometimes in "this is a completely new capability that didn't exist before" ways.
That combination of GCP depth and Fabric focus is the lens you'll find in most of what I write here.
What I write about
A few recurring themes on cloudingdata.ai:
Data quality - I've worked with around 20 clients across my career. Two of them had a serious, systematic data quality framework in place. That number bothers me enough that it keeps coming up in my writing.
Microsoft Fabric - from the perspective of someone who came in from the outside. What's genuinely impressive, what still needs work, how to actually build production-ready things on it.
Google Cloud - BigQuery, dbt, Dataform, Looker. Reference architectures, patterns, and the things that tripped me up on real projects.
Ways of working - how data teams should be structured, how to handle technical leadership, how to talk to business stakeholders about data in a way that builds trust instead of confusion.
Certifications - I hold a few (Google, dbt, Terraform, Airflow and now some Microsoft Fabric of course) and I write practical study guides for the ones I go through.
What this blog is not
It's not a news aggregator. There are plenty of places that summarise Microsoft's release notes or repost GCP announcements. When I cover new features or platform updates, it's because I was curious to try (or I had to used it in real life) and I have something to say about what they actually mean in practice - not just what they are.
It's also not a "best practices" blog in the generic sense. Most of what I write comes from something I saw go wrong on a real project, or a decision I had to make without a clear playbook, or a question I kept getting asked and couldn't find a good answer anywhere.
Let's connect
If something I've written is useful or if you disagree with something and want to talk about it, I'd genuinely like to hear from you. Leave a comment on any post, or find me on Linkedin.
And if you want new posts in your inbox when they drop, the newsletter is the best way. No noise, no promotion.. just the posts.
Hope you enjoy!
Cheers,
Carlos
Microsoft Fabric Practice Lead at Devoteam - Porto, Portugal
13 years in data engineering and analytics engineering - SQL - Google Cloud - Microsoft Fabric - dbt - BigQuery - data quality