Notes on dataarchitecture.
Short essays on architecture, cost, hiring and AI: one cartoon, one idea, most days of the week. No tutorials, no listicles.
Pipeline Replay Decision Tree
Most pipelines are designed for the happy path. The first real outage makes recovery the only thing that matters.
Read →Fractional For Stack Survival
A fintech founder asked me to sanity-check their data stack three weeks before a raise. It wouldn't have survived the investor's technical …
Read →75% Belgian SMEs On AI Daily
Three in four Belgian SMEs now use AI daily or weekly. Most are running it on data they wouldn't trust for a board report.
Read →Lakehouse Convergence Risks
The lakehouse pitch is one platform for raw files and clean tables. The trap is inheriting the data lake's oldest habit: land everything, …
Read →Databricks DBU Trap For ETL
Your Databricks bill is mostly DBUs. A lot of those DBUs run ETL that never needed Spark in the first place.
Read →Hero DE Burnout Cycle
Praising the engineer who fixes everything at 2am rewards the exact dependency that eventually takes the platform down with them.
Read →Premature Real-Time Tax
Streaming has a cost nobody puts in the business case: the weekly tax of running it after the demo works.
Read →Fractional Architect Series B Audit
Investor technical due diligence has one real question: will this stack survive the growth the round is funding?
Read →Wrong DE Hire Cost Matrix
A wrong data engineering hire runs you about three salaries by the time you count the ramp, the re-hire, and the work that stalled in …
Read →Semantic Layer Pitfalls - Invisible Technical Debt
You bought a semantic layer to end the "which number is right" argument. Eighteen months later you have 200 metrics and the same argument, …
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.