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.Click here to watch a video of this episode.Join the conversation shaping the future of energy.Collide is the community where oil & gas professionals connect, share insights, and solve real-world problems together. No noise. No fluff. Just the discussions that move our industry forward.Apply today at collide.ioClick here to view the episode transcript. 00:00 - Oil prices, energy costs, and life in Scotland vs Texas01:50 - Paul's background and path from drilling to data08:19 - WellSchematic.com and legacy well data as a service10:52 - Drilling war stories: West Africa and the Falklands15:00 - UK oil industry and energy policy34:41 - Legacy well file digitization38:06 - The PDF table extraction problem42:22 - Open source models vs foundational models44:31 - AI stack, data privacy, and cloud infrastructure51:54 - AI's role in the upstream industry56:04 - Getting tech adopted in the drilling world59:06 - Coding journey: from PHP and Laravel to Python1:02:22 - Advice for engineers getting into coding1:09:38 - Programming languages and AI-assisted development1:11:56 - Cursor and Claude Code1:13:55 - Speed round: Scotland, whiskey, and cloud platformshttps://twitter.com/collide_aihttps://www.tiktok.com/@collide.iohttps://www.facebook.com/collide.iohttps://www.instagram.com/collide.iohttps://www.youtube.com/@collide_iohttps://bsky.app/profile/collide-ai.bsky.socialhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/collideai