Notes on dataarchitecture.
Short essays on architecture, cost, hiring and AI: one cartoon, one idea, most days of the week. No tutorials, no listicles.
Risk Sharing In Data Failures
On one team, engineers reported their own near-misses weekly. Incidents dropped within a quarter.
Read →BigQuery Vs Snowflake For Ad-Hoc
BigQuery vs Snowflake for ad-hoc work comes down to one choice: pay per scan or pay per minute.
Read →DORA For Data Reliability
The DORA metrics are over a decade old, proven on software teams, and unused on most data teams I meet.
Read →Platform Fragility Post-Organic
Before the term sheet, a CTO asked for a modularity audit. The feared rewrite turned out to be 6 seams.
Read →Governance Added Late Fix
The data lake had 300 datasets and no owner list. The audit notice gave us 4 months.
Read →DE Compensation Trends EU
A client budgeted 2024 salaries for a 2026 data engineer role. The vacancy is now in month six.
Read →Iceberg Is Open. Your Security Model Isn't
An auditor asked who could read the customer table. With three engines on one Iceberg catalog, nobody could answer.
Read →Fractional Positioning For BE Startups
A CTO said "that's exactly us" four minutes into the call. The pitch was a description of his company.
Read →Cost Of No Data Contracts
A team of 8 data engineers spent roughly 30% of their week negotiating schema changes in Slack.
Read →AI Modeling Crisis Patterns
Every failed RAG project I've reviewed had the same upstream issue: nobody modeled the data underneath it.
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.