Notes on dataarchitecture.
Short essays on architecture, cost, hiring and AI: one cartoon, one idea, most days of the week. No tutorials, no listicles.
Contract-First Data For Cross-Team Handoffs
Most cross-team data fights are caused by an undocumented assumption upstream.
Read →Orchestration Tool Audit For Small Data Teams
Two-engineer data teams keep picking Airflow because it's "industry standard." Six months in, half the DAGs are commented out.
Read →Semantic Layer Is A Consistency Tool, Not A Speed Tool
A semantic layer is a consistency tool. Most teams buy it for speed and end up disappointed.
Read →Software Modernization Is Not Architectural Modernization
Software modernization and architectural modernization are different problems with different fixes.
Read →Brent Is Your Data Engineer (Phoenix Project applied)
Every data team has a Brent. The person every ticket eventually routes through.
Read →The Day Our Pipeline Became a Person's Full-Time Job
The day I realized our pipeline had become a person's full-time job.
Read →FinOps for Data Audit Checklist (8 Cost Levers)
Your cloud data bill grew last year. Can anyone explain which workloads drove it?
Read →The Data Product Canvas (One-Page Definition)
An empty "consumers" field is the signal to deprecate the asset. Most teams ignore it.
Read →Blameless Post-Mortem Template for Data Incidents
Your data incident post-mortems end with "be more careful." That's not a fix.
Read →Data Platform Maturity Model (5 Stages)
Your data platform is at stage 2. You're copying stage 5 patterns. That's why it's breaking.
Read →Want expert eyes on your data architecture?
No pitch. An honest conversation about whether I can help, and what shape it would take if I can.