Dan Quach Blog
How Cooking Works
In 2006, I did my first start-up howcookingworks.com where the idea was a site to learn how to cook....
12th Apr 2026
In 2006, I did my first start-up howcookingworks.com where the idea was a site to learn how to cook. The first part of the site described the techniques of cooking, and the other was where cooks could connect to participants to learn from them. At the time, I went to a lot of...
Dan Quach Blog
Reflections at 44, Tofu, Ancient Robots, Fanny Crosby
44 I recently turned 44, and this year resonates more than others for the simple fact that there are...
24th Oct 2025
44 I recently turned 44, and this year resonates more than others for the simple fact that there are two repeating numbers. Other numbers that have come to mind are 22, 44, and 88. At 22, I had just graduated from college with a computer science degree during a mild recession,...
Dan Quach Blog
Digital Ghosts, Wisdom, and Tennis Matchmaking
Digital Ghosts My mom recently had a free consultation from her electric company to assess replacing...
16th Jun 2025
Digital Ghosts My mom recently had a free consultation from her electric company to assess replacing her propane water heater with an electric water pump heater. She forwarded the assessment report to me, and I spent some time reviewing and researching the program. Despite...
Dan Quach Blog
A Data Engineering Perspective of LLMs
Data engineering is a field I would categorize as a subspecialty of software engineering. It shares...
8th Apr 2025
Data engineering is a field I would categorize as a subspecialty of software engineering. It shares the same concerns as software engineering—scalability, maintainability, and other “-ilities”—but its primary focus is on data. It’s a unique discipline because data is inherently...
Dan Quach Blog
State of Data Engineering 2025 Q1
AI Updates There is a lot of chatter about 2025 being the year of agentic frameworks. To me, this...
6th Feb 2025
AI Updates There is a lot of chatter about 2025 being the year of agentic frameworks. To me, this means a system in which a subset can allow AI models to take independent actions based on their environment, typically interacting with external APIs or interfaces. The terminology...
Dan Quach Blog
State of Data Engineering Q3 2024
Prompt Engineering – Meta Analysis Whitepaper One of my favorite AI podcasts, Latent Space, recently...
23rd Oct 2024
Prompt Engineering – Meta Analysis Whitepaper One of my favorite AI podcasts, Latent Space, recently featured Sander Schulhoff, one of the authors of a comprehensive research paper on prompt engineering. This meta-study reviews over 1,600 published papers, with co-authors from...
Dan Quach Blog
Braces
Growing up I had the same dentist from childhood to adulthood. My dentist’s office was run by...
24th Jun 2024
Growing up I had the same dentist from childhood to adulthood. My dentist’s office was run by Dentist Chung (in Vietnamese I called him Bác Sĩ Chung – which means Dr Chung translated directly) and his sister running the office. The office was in Garden Grove, in between the...
Dan Quach Blog
Vietnam
Grandma and the Vietnam WarWhen I was young, friends would visit, and there was one photo on the...
13th Apr 2024
Grandma and the Vietnam WarWhen I was young, friends would visit, and there was one photo on the shelf that caught their attention in my room. It was a photo of an elderly Caucasian lady and their first question to me was, “How come you didn’t take the stock photo out of the...
Dan Quach Blog
The Unexpected $30,000 Benefit of the Pandemic: Haircuts
During the early pandemic, a topic came up I never thought I would need to worry about. Who would...
29th Feb 2024
During the early pandemic, a topic came up I never thought I would need to worry about. Who would cut my hair? My Asian hair is a bit funky where it is similar to Wolverine in X-men. After a couple weeks the sides get really pointy and uncomfortable so I would go to the barber...
Dan Quach Blog
State of Data Engineering 2024 Q1
The current state of data engineering offers a plethora of options in the market, which can be...
25th Jan 2024
The current state of data engineering offers a plethora of options in the market, which can be challenging when selecting the right tool We are approaching a period where the traditional boundaries between between databases, datalakes, and data warehouses are overlapping. As...
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