Books
Alex has written 77 books on data and AI, economics and philosophy, fiction, and tabletop roleplaying. These are the flagship titles. The full catalog, with every book's details, is on books.alexmerced.com.
Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide
A comprehensive guide to Apache Iceberg and modern lakehouse architecture, covering table format internals, schema evolution, partitioning, and integration with major query engines.
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Apache Polaris: The Definitive Guide
A guide to open catalogs for Apache Iceberg lakehouses, covering Polaris catalog architecture, configuration, and governance.
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Architecting an Apache Iceberg Lakehouse
Architecture patterns and best practices for building production-grade, Iceberg-based data platforms from the ground up.
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Building the Software Factory
Co-authored with Benedikt Stemmildt. How to turn AI coding agents into a dependable, team-wide software factory using context engineering, AI-TDD, harness design, and the AEMM and Elastic Loop frameworks, moving teams from vibe coding to disciplined agentic engineering.
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