Notes on dataarchitecture.
Short essays on architecture, cost, hiring and AI: one cartoon, one idea, most days of the week. No tutorials, no listicles.
Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling
Vertical scaling is adding RAM. Horizontal scaling is adding servers. One has a ceiling. One doesn't.
Read →Data Platform Teams Are Becoming Product Teams
Nobody adopts a pipeline. They adopt a product. That's what most data teams still don't get.
Read →The Compliance Incident That Cost a Giant Fine (And One Email)
They had microservices, a data lake, and Grafana dashboards for everything. They didn't have an answer to "where does this customer's data …
Read →The Data Platform Scaling Checklist (When to Evolve)
Scaling too late costs you 6 months. Scaling too early costs you 18.
Read →Parts Unlimited" Is Your Data Platform
The Phoenix Project described a company drowning in unplanned work. Gene Kim called it Parts Unlimited. You might recognize the patterns.
Read →Communication Overhead Kills Data Team Velocity
You doubled your data team. Delivery got worse. Fred Brooks explained why in 1975.
Read →From EUR80K/Month Cloud Bill to EUR45K - The Optimization Sprint
This company cut their cloud data bill from EUR80K to EUR45K in 6 weeks. No functionality lost.
Read →Analytics Lead Time - The Time to Insight Metric
Your data team takes 2 weeks to answer a business question. That decision's already been made.
Read →The Five Ideals Applied to Data Teams
Gene Kim wrote The Unicorn Project about a developer trapped in bureaucracy. Data engineers live that story every day.
Read →The Shadow IT Problem - When Fast Beats Right
Shadow IT doesn't start with rogue employees. It starts when the gap between 'I need this' and 'we can deliver this' gets too wide.
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.