Note that my current role at SentiLink entails a lot of writing (and sometimes analytics work) under other people’s bylines. I have not listed any of these articles here, which is why many of these examples are from my time at Cockroach Labs.
Reports:
Note: these reports are gated PDFs for generating leads. If you’d like to read a copy for the purposes of assessing my skills, but don’t want to give away your email address, feel free to shoot me an email. I unfortunately cannot provide direct download links here.
The SentiLink Fraud Report: 1H 2025 and 2H 2024
I was the sole author and primary researcher for these reports, the best-performing gated assets SentiLink has ever created (as of this writing). To create the first, I pulled and analyzed data for more than 100 million applications using SQL and Python, generated charts, and then wrote up the results into the final report. The second report analyzed more than 235 million applications and included a number of additional analyses. Both reports resulted in hundreds of valuable leads, in addition to receiving great feedback from SentiLink’s existing customers.
The State of Multi-Cloud 2024
I was the sole author and primary researcher for this report. We had a third-party research firm conduct the survey, but I did the data analysis, built out the charts, conducted interviews with experts and engineers for the qualitative insights, and then wrote it all up. (I did not do any of the final design, though; credit for all of that goes to Cockroach Labs’s amazing design team).
O’Reilly: What is Distributed SQL
I was one of three co-authors for this category-defining report on how distributed SQL databases differ from relational databases, and in what contexts they should be considered. While I have no access to data from O’Reilly, Cockroach Labs’s sponsorship of this report from 2022 to 2023 was a significant driver of conversions, and was a touchpoint for hundreds of qualified leads.
SEO Blogs:
What is a foreign key?
Rank #1 for over 20 relevant keywords. Cockroach Labs’s top driver of organic traffic (other than the homepage). Visited thousands of times by employees of companies on our list of target accounts.
What are UUIDs?
Rank #1 for over 40 relevant keywords. Top-five driver of organic traffic. Visited thousands of times by employees of companies on our list of target accounts.
What is a Credit Privacy Number (CPN) and Why Are They Illegal?
Rank #2 on Google for “CPN” and ranks for a number of long-tail terms despite site domain authority below 30, highest-traffic page on the company website (other than homepage) in the past 90 days, above-average on-page engagement time.
These are just a few samples. As of this leaving Cockroach Labs, I had written nine of the ten highest-traffic Cockroach Labs blog posts (ranks 1 through 9), and as of this writing at SentiLink I was the writer and editor of four of the top-five highest-traffic blog posts (ranks 1 through 4), although a few of them are under other bylines. Cockroach Labs content data cited here is accurate as of Oct 2023, SentiLink content accurate as of Feb 9, 2025.
As of this writing, the report has been out for less than a day, so it will be a while before we can truly measure its impact, but it is already approaching 500 downloads, and a quick look at the leads list reveals that it seems to be working for the target audience (CTOs and other C-suite folks, senior architects, etc.)
Technical articles:
How to create an AWS Lambda function with Python and CockroachDB serverless
I wrote this article, and also created the embedded video and the gifs that are used to demonstrate what to do within the AWS UI.
Synchronous replication, asynchronous replication, and the sneaky way data can get lost
An in-depth piece I wrote in partnership with an SME to highlight a way that companies can be vulnerable to losing data in an outage, even when their data is replicated and “safe”.
Analytical articles:
What Birthdays Do Synthetic Fraudsters Choose?
This is an example of an end-to-end data analysis piece in which I pulled all of the relevant data with SQL, cleaned and analyzed it with Python, and then wrote up the results. (I made the original charts as well, but the charts here were touched-up by our designer).
Other stuff:
These are just a few selections. I’ve published thousands of things; everything from in-depth investigative journalism in The Atlantic to data science tutorials to fun culture pieces for a tech audience. If you want to see a sample of something else, just reach out and ask!
Charlie Custer 