Fred Kaffenberger (he/him)

I help people get value from technology.

While technology can make life better and improve processes, it takes a certain shrewdness to get to the core of its value and not be distracted by cool features and technobabble. Business intelligence, for example, is more about communication than it is about building technical stuff.

Data is what’s given to us.

I studied English Literature because it’s fun to find patterns in the unstructured data of a 1,000-page novel. Literature is also a great way of learning about people, relationships, and the wide world. For me, writing is all about clear communication— NOT alienating people with your brilliance. I have no interest in correcting grammar and usage, and those who do so are most often wrong.

I started out in sales. I’ve done consultative sales, inside sales, technical sales, advertising sales, B2B, B2C, inbound and outbound call center, business development, and fundraising. I’ve done some marketing as well. For me, sales is about understanding a real need and then proposing a solution. Sales experience has been useful in every job since.

I crossed over to the tech side when doing sales and marketing for a startup facilities management software company (software as a service). I took charge of prioritizing the backlog of enhancements, gathering requirements, communicating with developers, and testing new code for functionality and to see if it broke something else. For a while, we officed at a tech incubator.

Working at a startup incubator, I found that new tenants who couldn’t explain their sales pipeline wouldn’t last long. I also saw that the real money in startups is in providing consulting to new businesses. Whenever a new dreamer showed up, the consultants would practically line up outside their door.

I’ve done intense DAX consulting for P3 Adaptive, and was a crowd funder of the 2nd Edition of Power Pivot and Power BI: The Excel User's Guide to DAX, Power Query, Power BI & Power Pivot in Excel 2010-2016— now in color!

I implemented Power BI Pro for the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation. I kept the new data warehouse constrained to business needs. We expanded the IT during my time, and I enjoyed mentoring the new database admin and Salesforce admin. I learned so much about Power Query in my first six months.

When I started to work for Cerner [now Oracle], I was surprised to meet the CEO during orientation (he started the day after I did). I learned SO MUCH about DirectQuery and doing code reviews for SQL & Power BI with GitHub.

Opinions are my own— here are a few:

  • Forums can be fun places to hear about challenges I’ve never seen before & to develop clever workarounds.

    • Always try to understand the problem sufficiently before jumping in with an answer.

    • Never say the goal can’t be achieved with the tools. Forums can attract people who want to be an authority but when they don’t understand the problem or give a quick solution, they’ll say it can’t be done. There is generally a way to get things done but the cost of a workaround may be high.

  • Documentation always lags because agile development values working software over comprehensive documentation. Creating documentation has become a collaboration between power users, the community, and vendors.

  • Tools change but methods remain useful.

    • BI software is converging, so learn whatever you can get your hands on. Go deep, not wide. If you really know Power Query well, that will pay off when you get into SQL. If you know Tableau, you can learn Power BI and vice versa.

  • The literal meaning of a word is its etymological meaning [in retrospect, this is a pretty AuDHD thing]

  • A space should always follow an m-dash (—); an ellipsis is a character (…) not 3 periods.

On the personal side

In doing my Flower exercise for What Color Is Your Parachute?, I identified my main values as: learning, faith, honesty, curiosity, and enthusiasm. I’m Catholic, married for 25 years to Karen. We have three adult kids: one who’s gay, one who’s bi, and one who’s trans. Together, we are affirming, welcoming parents.

My topics have shifted (life finds a way), but one can still follow the original tech category by using site navigation and RSS feed. Some posts have overlapping categories.

Neurodiversity

I was diagnosed with ADHD in late 2022, years after a screening test in 5th grade said that I was hyperactive. What was missing in 5th grade was a community of people with similar experience of the world to help me understand myself.

Like many ADHD folks, I see myself as having some autistic traits as well: need for routine, awareness of changes, oddly good memory for certain things, etc. I prefer the term neurodiverse but AuDHD is common in neurodiverse communities to refer to this combination.

I’m not an expert or authority on cognitive function or neurodiversity, but I blog out of my own experience. I reflect on the experience of living as an ADHD person with the understanding that humans have a core desire for happiness. ADHD topics (and neurodiversity) can be followed under the adhd category.

Ex-Communion and Liberation

For about 20 years, I was active with the Catholic group Communion and Liberation (CL). Why did I leave? It’s complicated 🙂.

  1. CL never reached critical mass in my daily environment. As a result, it took us away from local commitments.

  2. CL was made for young people, whether marginal or rigid in their faith. With our kids grown, that’s not our scene.

  3. CL tends to defend the clergy and hierarchy, and I am more critical.

I don’t speak for CL. I’m not an academic scholar on the topic of CL or Luigi Giussani.

I have, however, read and experienced plenty over the years, and I do have judgements. Most are critical in the CL sense of examining something carefully. What I write is an attempt to ‘test everything and hold fast to what is good.’ And there’s much that has been good for me. I don’t say everything either. For example, if there was a certain minor book by Giussani which I read, and that I found to be terrible, it wouldn’t be a good use of my time to write about how terrible it is.

If you follow tech navigation you can avoid these posts entirely. If you follow the life category you can avoid most of them. These posts can be found at the cl category.