Notes on dataarchitecture.

Short essays on architecture, cost, hiring and AI: one cartoon, one idea, most days of the week. No tutorials, no listicles.

A backend deploy broke the data pipeline for the third time this quarter. Both teams had done their jobs correctly.

A client built the same data inventory twice in 18 months. The first one was for the auditor.

Postgres handled it fine. Until the agent started issuing thousands of embedding lookups a second.

We changed the questions in the postmortem, and the recurring outage stopped recurring.

Data platform changes have a good window and a bad one. Funding milestones tell you which is which.

We scored a client's pipelines on cost against consumption. About 1 in 5 had a monthly bill and zero consumers.

Four questions, asked consistently, replaced most of one engineering manager's architecture decisions.

Duplicate invoices came from the recovery, not the outage. The retry replayed 40 minutes into a double-counting sink.

A company at 40 people needs senior data judgment about 2 days a week. Full-time is the wrong container.

Single-cloud is a fine strategy. Unpriced lock-in is a negotiating position, and not yours.

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.