About Nabil

I've never had "teacher" in a job title, but it's something I keep ending up doing anyway. During my MS in Business Analytics, that meant being the one classmates came to when they were stuck — usually on something I'd already worked out, and I liked figuring out how to explain it so it made sense to them too. What works best, I've found, is a small hands-on exercise that starts simple and adds one layer at a time. For the cohort I built an hour-long intro to SQL that did exactly that: it opened with the most basic query and worked up, step by step, until people were writing queries that would have looked intimidating an hour earlier. The department head later invited me to come back and teach in the program; the timing hasn't worked out yet, but I'd like to.

The same thing happens at work. At SFMTA I co-sponsor a Power BI power user group, where I run demo sessions built on the same idea: I hand people sample data and walk them through setting something up themselves, like configuring row-level access controls. Figuring out how to make a complicated thing clear, then handing someone the steps to do it themselves, is the part of the work I like best.

Off the clock, I'm a fanatical reader — and writer — of feminist science fiction. The instinct that makes someone walk into an org and ask "why do we do it this way?" is, I think, the same one that draws me to a genre that takes the world apart and rebuilds it on different assumptions. Octavia, the cat, is named for Octavia E. Butler. Samuel R. Delany lives on the nightstand. The drafts live in a different folder than the dashboards — one of them was nominated for the Tiptree Award.