Welcome to The Brian Journal: Notes on Data, AI, and Engineering
An introduction to The Brian Journal, a personal blog by Brian Castelino on data engineering, AI, analytics, and the tools and ideas behind what I build.
The Brian Journal is a personal blog where I write about data engineering, AI, analytics, and the tools I use to build things. This first post explains what the blog covers, who it is for, and how it is built.
What this blog is about
I work across data and AI, so most posts fall into one of three buckets:
- Engineering. The systems I build and the lessons learned along the way.
- Tools and workflow. Small improvements that compound over time.
- Ideas. Half-formed thoughts I want to reason through in writing.
If you work with data platforms, BI tools, or AI systems, you will probably find something useful here. My first technical deep dive covers Databricks Data + AI Summit 2026, with a breakdown of every major announcement.
Writing is thinking. Putting words down forces clarity.
How this site is built
This blog is a statically exported Next.js site, hosted for free on GitHub Pages. Posts are plain Markdown, so publishing a new one is as simple as adding a file to the content/posts folder.
# add a new post
content/posts/my-new-idea.md
I wrote up the full setup, including the free deployment pipeline, in How to build a free static blog with Next.js and GitHub Pages.
That is it for now. More soon.
Written byBrian CastelinoEngineer and writer. This is his personal blog about technology, the things he builds, and ideas he is working through.