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 Rise of Data SRE: Reliability Engineering for Data Platforms
Your data pipelines run in production. But nobody treats them like production systems. That's about to change.
Read →Observability Turned Our Senior Engineers Back Into Builders
Six months ago our senior engineers were firefighters. Now they're builders again. The change wasn't a reorg. It was observability.
Read →The Data Maturity Assessment You Can Do in 30 Minutes
Most maturity assessments take six weeks and a consulting firm. This one takes 30 minutes and a whiteboard.
Read →The Data Quality Crisis: 67% of Executives Don't Trust Their Analytics
Executives stopped using the dashboards. They didn't trust the data. Here's how we rebuilt trust in 10 weeks.
Read →Wardley Mapping Your Data Stack (Build, Buy, or Outsource?)
Your custom Airflow setup is not a competitive advantage. Your customer analytics model might be.
Read →The Incremental Migration Strategy (Strangler Fig Pattern)
You don't migrate a data platform in one go. You grow the new one around the old one.
Read →Data Observability + Data Catalog: The Convergence
Your data team switches between four tools during an incident. That's about to change.
Read →The Data Contract That Saved a Product Launch
The data contract didn't save the launch. It saved the three days of firefighting that would have followed.
Read →The RACI Nobody Wants to Fill In (And Why That's the Problem)
Everyone agrees on "data ownership." Nobody agrees on who actually owns what.
Read →The Metadata Moment: When 'Where Is This Data?' Costs You Two Engineers
Two full-time equivalents on your data team do nothing but answer questions all day.
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.