Notes on dataarchitecture.
Short essays on architecture, cost, hiring and AI: one cartoon, one idea, most days of the week. No tutorials, no listicles.
Ownership Vacuum Patterns
Nobody owned the orders table. Everyone had opinions about it in the incident channel.
Read →36% Learn AI Via Tools
Your engineers are already learning AI at work. The only question is whether it's sanctioned.
Read →Observability Blast Radius
A failure that cost one dashboard last year now takes out 40 downstream jobs. The platform grew. The alerts didn't.
Read →Series B Hiring Role Matrix
Half the "Head of Data" searches I see are two different jobs wearing one title.
Read →AI Data Foundation Check
Every AI roadmap I review gets the same first check: whether the data could go in a board deck unchecked.
Read →Pipeline Full-Time Owner Trap (Year 2 Update)
One pipeline quietly consumed a full data engineer. On a team of 5, that's 20% of capacity feeding one job.
Read →Data Mesh Readiness For 50+
A 60-person scaleup asked me to design their data mesh. After the readiness check, we kept the central team.
Read →ETL Cost Benchmarks SME
An ETL cost audit cut a small team's bill by roughly a third. Same 4 patterns I always find.
Read →Leadership Debt Compounds
Tech debt gets a backlog and a budget. Leadership debt gets a shrug, and it compounds faster.
Read →FinTech DORA Data Prep
DORA has applied since January 2025. The data plumbing behind its incident reports is missing at most FinTechs I see.
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.