December 31, 2024
Down in Tasmania, where the winds off the Bass Strait tangle with high-voltage infrastructure, Kirk Mower is managing a data team small enough to fit around a foldable lunch table.
He’s the Data Manager at Solstice Energy, a utility company that owns and operates the state’s natural gas distribution network, recently expanding into electricity retail. The data flowing through Solstice is as varied as the services they offer: raw reads from gas meters, XML files from electricity regulators, Excel spreadsheets from industrial operators. And for a long time, the job of turning that chaos into clean reporting fell to a fragile patchwork of legacy tools, contractors, and one massive spreadsheet.
“We had this giant Excel workbook - everyone called it the calculation bible,” Mower recalled. “You miss a column, regulators get the wrong numbers.”
The solution, for years, had been manpower: four third-party contractors devoted to slicing, pasting, and prepping regulatory reports. But the work was tedious and fraught, and the risk of human error was ever-present. “It’s not just the cost,” Mower said. “A lot of it’s just pure pain. Stressful work. You’re cutting and pasting and trying to remember if you grabbed the right thing. It’s numbing.”
A Simpler Stack and a Smaller Ask
Mower is no stranger to heavyweight data tooling. In previous roles, he’d set up Airflow and Astronomer. He knew what it took to commission those DAGs and pipelines, and he also knew exactly what he didn’t want to sign up for again.
When he joined Solstice, he inherited a greenfield environment - no entrenched tools, no warring factions over platforms. It was, as he put it, “great, because often in larger corporations you have to explain things to the nth degree and get challenged by 28 different people.” Here, he could build with clarity.
But building with clarity didn’t mean building with complexity. Solstice didn’t have the headcount for Kubernetes, nor the time for elaborate CI/CD setups. “It's just me and a couple people enabling self-service across the business,” he said. “I don’t like the word democratization to me it’s just access.”
He needed something lightweight but powerful, modular but maintainable. Something that could pull in files, hit APIs, transform energy volumes and meter reads into clean reports - without turning his team into DevOps engineers.
From OSS to Pro, With Zero Drama
Mower had already started using Mage’s open-source version, hosting it on AWS with ECS and a little CI from GitHub. It worked, but maintaining the infra came with overhead. So when Solstice changed AWS tenancies, he used it as an opportunity to switch to Mage Pro.
“We cloned the repo, dropped the infra stuff, and connected to Mage Pro,” he said. “Done.”
The transition took a few days - not full-time effort, just a clean handoff. No migration drama. No re-architecting. “I don’t have to cut the latest version or anything. It’s just there.”
Mage’s modular approach also proved more accessible for teammates. “You write a SQL block, hit run, and see the output,” he said. “It’s fast, visual, and easy to debug. That workbook style gives you immediate feedback instead of poke and hope.”
That accessibility meant Mower could bring in junior staff without years of engineering experience. One teammate had never coded before; now they were contributing Python.
Automation Without Vendor Lock-In
With Mage in place, Solstice fully automated its gas reporting pipelines. The four contractors were no longer needed, and what had once been high-stakes manual reporting now ran on schedule, with transparency and traceability.
For Mower, the win wasn’t just fewer headaches or cleaner code, it was flexibility. “If I want to try Clickhouse or Starburst, I can. Mage doesn’t care,” he said. That agnosticism matters in a world where vendors often push platform lock-in and rising compute costs. “I want to be flexible. I don’t like salespeople coming and telling me I need to increase my spend again by another 30% - and not even getting a hoodie that fits.”
That freedom, he said, offers something deeper than convenience. “Mentally, it’s really good,” he said. “It lets you be a free thinker. You’re not stuck trying to scrunch a square peg into a round hole.”
The True Value: Sanity
Mower’s view of success isn’t adorned with big metrics or dramatic dashboards. He values simplicity. He values not having to build five different tools to solve one problem. And he values keeping his team small, sharp, and unstressed.
“It’s not about replacing people,” he said. “It’s about removing pain.”
Mage gave him that. And for a three-person team carrying the load of a much larger operation, that kind of lift is hard to overstate.
TLDR
With Mage Pro, the win wasn’t just about savings.
Junior team members now contribute confidently. With Mage’s visual blocks, they don’t need to decipher 500-line Python DAGs. They write SQL. They run it. They see results.
Infra disappeared. Kirk no longer explains containers to analysts or wrestles with IAM roles. Mage handles the plumbing.
Kirk gets to be a builder again. He spends less time babysitting and more time designing flexible, future-proof data systems.
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