Originally posted as an Engineer of Data newsletter.

I started a new venture, and I’m excited to announce the launch of the very first product!

To be fair, this is a beta version, designed specifically to be a minimally-viable product.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of minimally-viable product design, I encourage you to read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

FDF (Fabric Data Factory) Pipeline Navigator is available and free!

What is the Problem I am Trying to Solve?

I often find myself popping between Fabric workspaces and pipelines when developing data engineering solutions. The web interface works just fine, but one day I said to myself, “Self? Is there a way I could zip from one pipeline to the next in a couple clicks?”

Before you can say “Jack Robinson,” I had Visual Studio open (“My name is Andy and I use Visual Studio”) and was slinging C# left and right. It was pandemonium, I tell ya… PANDEMONIUM!

With a Little Help From My (AI) Friend

I used the project to test drive Claude for coding. My results in a nutshell? Engaging Claude multiplied my coding velocity.

Was Claude always right? <cough> <gug> <cough>… excuse me, I typed that line while taking a sip of water… No. Goodness no, Claude was not always right. But here’s the kicker: Claude saved me so much time that it could wrong a bunch and still save me oodles of time.

I Like Treeviews

For representing hierarchical stuff, I can find no better control than a treeview.
There.
I said it.
Well, I wrote it.
Out loud, even.

Although I forgot to post it on the product page, I really like the Search functionality:

“Navigate to Item” expands parent treeview nodes and sets the selected node to the pipeline upon which one right-clicks in the Search Results dialog. From there, you’re a right- and a left-click away from opening a new tab displaying the pipeline in your default browser, and then an-editin’ you may go.

Tinkering…

I used the project to template additional ideas:

Notifications – I’ve long admired the “notification bell” in the lower right corner of many Microsoft “studio” products (SQL Server Management Studio, Visual Studio, etc.). I find it a very low-intrusive and non-interrupting way to let me know there’s something the product or marketing team would like to share with me, when I have a minute.

It’s not all in-my-face like a message box.

With Claude’s help, it took me less than one week to implement notifications.
Now, you may be thinking, “it took you almost 40 hours to build something that simple and easy, Andy??”
Please.
I own and operate a consulting firm. And a few other ventures in various stages of startup, operation-bets, and shutdown. And I help out around the house and farm and reach things that are too high up for my wife (she’s a size cute). And I herd (five literal) cats and one dog (Nutmeg, the Wonder Dog. You can see Nutmeg’s picture here).

Total dev time for notifications was approximately 15 hours. If that. It would have taken more than 40 hours without Claude’s help, of that I am certain.

Product Version labels – For years I’ve given updated versions new version numbers (this version is 0.1.0.1). Now I have a slick little engine to manage product names and versions – represented in an Azure SQL DB by a Product Id – which is a field in the notifications table so I can reuse that table for multiple products (some of which I hope to announce later this year, Lord willing).

Conclusion

I learned a lot taking vibe coding out on my first spin around the block. I’ll be using Claude more for accelerated product development. It’s a good fit for shipping minimally-viable products.

:{>