Technical Debt & Economics

80 posts filed under Technical Debt & Economics.

LIMIT 10 doesn't reduce what BigQuery scans on an unclustered table. A lot of teams learn that from the invoice.

Before any stack change I ask how many consumers it touches and whether we can undo it by Friday.

GDPR and the AI Act ask their questions at the same moment: when a dataset gets reused for a model.

Before your AI feature ships to EU customers, try deleting one customer from everything it reads.

AI writes a working pipeline in 10 minutes. Nobody has asked it to be on call for one.

A dataset with no owner and no cost ceiling will always be somebody else's problem.

Every platform vendor offers 20-30% for an annual commit. The discount is real. The forecast underneath it usually isn't.

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

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

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

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