The Definitive Guide to Forward Deployed Engineering

Originally published on Next Play The Bottom Line A Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) is a software engineer who owns customer outcomes - not just satisfaction scores or relationships, but actual results customers achieve with the software. This distinction fundamentally changes everything about how engineers approach their work. The critical insight is that you cannot easily hire your way to a true FDE organization. This skill set is too rare and specific, dependent on experiences most engineers never have. Traditional engineering roles insulate engineers from customer reality. The only way to build an FDE organization is to take talented people and put them through experiences that transform how they think about building software. ...

February 5, 2026 · 9 min · 1862 words · Vinoo Ganesh

Context Is The Easy Part

Originally published on Kepler Everyone’s talking about context engineering right now, but most of the conversation is focused on the wrong thing. Read the blog posts, the guides, the thought leadership. They’re all asking the same questions: What should I include in the context window? How do I manage tokens efficiently? How do I curate what the model sees? These are valid questions. They’re also the easy part. The hard part isn’t deciding what context to include. It’s building systems that deliver that context reliably, with provenance, at scale, every single time. That’s not a context problem. That’s an engineering problem. And engineering means something specific. ...

January 30, 2026 · 4 min · 698 words · Vinoo Ganesh

Databricks Delta Live Tables 101

Originally published on Sync Computing Databricks’ DLT offering showcases a substantial improvement in the data engineer lifecycle and workflow. By offering a pre-baked, and opinionated pipeline construction ecosystem, Databricks has finally started offering a holistic end-to-end data engineering experience from inside of its own product, which provides superior solutions for raw data workflow, live batching and a host of other benefits detailed below. Since its release in 2022, Databricks’ Delta Live Tables have quickly become a go-to end-to-end resource for data engineers looking to build opinionated ETL pipelines for streaming data and big data. The pipeline management framework is considered one of the most valuable offerings on the databricks platform, and is used by over 1,000 companies including Shell and H&R block. ...

March 8, 2024 · 7 min · 1282 words · Vinoo Ganesh

The Future in Tech: Data Engineering Powers AI Revolution

Originally streamed live on August 3, 2023 - LinkedIn Learning’s “The Future in Tech” series Data engineering is the unsung hero fueling the rapid growth and consumption of artificial intelligence. It transforms AI’s potential into reality, driving digital innovation and reshaping the world. In this comprehensive discussion, we explore how data engineering unlocks and enables democratized use of Artificial Intelligence. Video: The Future in Tech - Data Engineering and AI Discussion (1,668 views) ...

August 3, 2023 · 4 min · 846 words · Vinoo Ganesh