EP 83: Paul Brown from BDE Data

Paul Brown, Founder and Principal Engineer at BDE Data, joins John and Bobby all the way from Scotland for a conversation that covers a lot of ground. From his days as an international drilling engineer dodging pirates off the coast of West Africa to building WellSchematic.com and tackling the nightmare of digitizing 50-year-old multilingual well files, Paul is the rare person who speaks both languages fluently.

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Click here to view the episode transcript.

00:00 - Oil prices, energy costs, and life in Scotland vs Texas
01:50 - Paul's background and path from drilling to data
08:19 - WellSchematic.com and legacy well data as a service
10:52 - Drilling war stories: West Africa and the Falklands
15:00 - UK oil industry and energy policy
34:41 - Legacy well file digitization
38:06 - The PDF table extraction problem
42:22 - Open source models vs foundational models
44:31 - AI stack, data privacy, and cloud infrastructure
51:54 - AI's role in the upstream industry
56:04 - Getting tech adopted in the drilling world
59:06 - Coding journey: from PHP and Laravel to Python
1:02:22 - Advice for engineers getting into coding
1:09:38 - Programming languages and AI-assisted development
1:11:56 - Cursor and Claude Code
1:13:55 - Speed round: Scotland, whiskey, and cloud platforms

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