Notes on dataarchitecture.
Short essays on architecture, cost, hiring and AI: one cartoon, one idea, most days of the week. No tutorials, no listicles.
The Medallion Architecture Backlash
Bronze, Silver, Gold. Three layers that make sense on a slide and fall apart the moment someone asks "where does this transformation …
Read →The Tiered Storage Strategy (Hot, Warm, Cold)
Hot, warm, cold. Three tiers, one policy, and suddenly your storage bill makes sense.
Read →The Feedback Loop - Why Data Incidents Keep Recurring
Your data team hides problems because they'll get blamed for them. The Unicorn Project calls this the downward spiral. Here's how to break …
Read →The Migration That Didn't Solve Anything
The most expensive way to avoid fixing your organizational problems: migrate to a new data platform.
Read →The Data Incident Response Playbook (MTTR Edition)
When your data breaks, how long until someone notices? If the answer is "when the CFO calls," you don't have an incident response process.
Read →60% of Your Cloud Spend Is Waste (Here's Where)
Your data platform is burning money in three places right now. You're probably only looking at one.
Read →The Acquisition Disaster - When Technical Debt Tanks a Deal
Due diligence found 15 "temporary" integrations from 2019 still running in production. The acquisition deal died that afternoon.
Read →Brent Is Your Senior Data Engineer
Every data team has a Brent. The one person who knows everything. The one person the org can't afford to lose. The one person who's about to …
Read →The Self-Service Analytics Maturity Ladder
"Self-service analytics" at most companies means "we gave everyone PowerBI access and hoped for the best."
Read →The Death of the Full-Stack Data Engineer
Stop hiring full-stack data engineers. They don't exist, and pretending they do is burning your team out.
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.