Man it feels good to be back! I took some weeks off in July to travel around and reconnect with friends and family to celebrate my birthday (as any respectable Leo would). Like many others I went to go see Spiderman: Brand New Day (in ScreenX) with my close circle and was completely in awe of it from start to finish. It’s a beautiful story that felt like it came at the perfect time in my life as a single person navigating this crazy world, but I’ll leave it at that for anyone who has not seen it yet.
While I was gone, a lot of you showed up! If you found PlotStack through the Power BI templates, welcome, and also: fair warning, this newsletter is not really about Power BI. It's about the part of the job that comes before and after the tool.
Readers of PlotStack are more concerned about who is going to read this chart. What decision are they making. What do they already believe. The tooling is downstream of all of that, and I'll happily talk DAX with you, but it isn't the entire point here.
So this issue is a light one. A short couples notes, five past issues worth your time, and a couple of things I've been using. Regular programming resumes next cycle.
Enjoy your upcoming week!
- Dmitri
Five issues that still hold up, and why each one is worth the click.
1. The Full Stack Analyst (Issue 18) The one that gets found through search more than anything else I've written. If you want the thesis behind this whole newsletter in one place, it's this one.
2. Metrics That Lie (Issue 32) Every number on your dashboard is a choice someone made. This is about the choices that quietly point the wrong direction.
3. The Dashboard Framing Problem (Issue 29) Most "bad dashboards" aren't badly built. They're just answering a question nobody asked.
4. Staying Relevant in Tech (Issue 33) Less about tools, more about not building a career on top of one vendor's roadmap.
5. Building VizBuddy (Issue 31) I built a Chrome extension. It got rejected four times. Here's what shipping something actually looked like.
🕹️ Trivia
William Playfair invented most of the charts you use every day. Which one is not his?
A. The line chart
B. The bar chart
C. The pie chart
D. The scatter plot
Answer at the bottom of this issue
Interesting Reads (TL;DR)
Why Big Tech Is Quietly Rehiring After Mass AI Layoffs by Cloud Engineer Academy
A useful corrective that cuts the other way too: less than 5% of 2025's layoffs were directly attributed to AI, with "AI efficiency" often serving as cover for ordinary over-hiring corrections. Read more →
From BI to Predictive AI: Why Analysts Are the Heroes of the Next Data Frontier by Zohar Bronfman
BI Analysts are being looked to as predictive leaders. Modern automation tools empower BI analysts to lead predictive analytics, shifting businesses from reactive dashboards to proactive forecasting that drives actionable decisions. Read more →
McDonald's Just Fired Its Drive-Thru AI and Is Turning to Humans Instead by Chris Morris @ Fortune
McDonald's deployed AI order-taking bots across 100 U.S. drive-throughs, then officially shut the test down and brought human cashiers back after viral videos showed failures like adding hundreds of dollars of nuggets to simple orders. Read more →
Resources & Tools
Onetime Secret #productivity
Paste a password, secret message, or private link without including in your emails or chat logs. Once the receiver opens your link, it expires. Simple and free!
Evidence #data-visualization #productivity
A framework for building BI reports as code (SQL + Markdown), version-controlled like anything else. A good example of the "judgment travels, tooling changes" thesis in practice: the report logic outlives the dashboard tool. Open source.
This Week’s Quick Study
▶️ Data Storytelling Basics (in 3 Steps): How to Communicate Data and Numbers by Word Cortex with Anita (5 mins)
Anita challenges the old statement “the data speaks for itself” (it does not!). And she explains why and what we, as data professionals, can do to set up a great story using data.
CLASSIFIEDS
FROM THE EDITOR
Summarize and understand anything on the web.
Turn any screen into instant insight, VizBuddy captures your browser and hands you a structured analyst-grade summary in seconds (Chrome only).
FROM THE EDITOR
Free Notion templates built for data professionals.
Trusted by 1,000+ users, download the templates designed to keep your goals, projects, and ideas in perfect sync.
🕹️ Answer
William Playfair invented most of the charts you use every day. Which one is not his?
A. The line chart
B. The bar chart
C. The pie chart
D. The scatter plot ✅
Playfair gave us the line chart and bar chart in 1786 and the pie chart in 1801. The scatter plot is generally credited to John Herschel in 1833, mapping double stars. So the next time someone tells you the pie chart is a modern crime against analytics, it's actually older than the scatter plot by three decades.
How was this week’s issue?
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If you’re feeling generous and want to toss a gift in my PO Box, I also keep an active wishlist of items or books I’m interested in.
