Michael Fortman
Data Engineer, SHI
Newberry, South Carolina, United States
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Michael Fortman is a Business Intelligence and Data Engineering practitioner with 30+ years of experience building data systems that balance practicality with architectural discipline. His current work centers on Microsoft Fabric and developing structured, defensive notebook patterns within medallion-based data platforms.
Through “Doing More With Data,” Michael focuses on reducing cognitive load in analytics engineering by treating notebooks as engineered artifacts rather than interactive scratchpads. His interests include parameterization contracts, Spark execution behavior, governance-aware design, and scalable development workflows.
He holds the DP-600 (Microsoft Fabric Analytics Engineer) certification and actively participates in the Microsoft data community
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Designing Defensive Fabric Notebooks: Contracts and Parameterization for Medallion Architecture
Most Microsoft Fabric notebook examples focus on functionality; far fewer address engineering discipline. As notebook-based data engineering scales across teams and pipelines, hidden state, implicit dependencies, and ad-hoc parameter handling introduce risk and cognitive overload.
In this session, we’ll explore defensive design patterns for Fabric notebooks within a medallion architecture. We’ll cover treating Cell 1 as a formal contract, structuring derived namespaces, separating configuration from transformation logic, and designing notebooks that behave consistently in both interactive and orchestrated execution.
We’ll also examine how Spark’s lazy evaluation model affects debugging and cost, when to use cache vs persist intentionally, and how to structure development workflows that minimize rework and unintended compute.
Attendees will leave with practical structural patterns to make their Fabric notebooks safer, clearer, and production-ready, reducing cognitive load while improving reliability.
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