Notes on dataarchitecture.
Short essays on architecture, cost, hiring and AI: one cartoon, one idea, most days of the week. No tutorials, no listicles.
Brent Is Your Senior Data Engineer
Every data team has a Brent. The one person who knows everything. The one person the org can't afford to lose. The one person who's about to …
Read →The Self-Service Analytics Maturity Ladder
"Self-service analytics" at most companies means "we gave everyone PowerBI access and hoped for the best."
Read →The Death of the Full-Stack Data Engineer
Stop hiring full-stack data engineers. They don't exist, and pretending they do is burning your team out.
Read →The Dashboard Nobody Uses (EUR60K Lesson)
Three months of development. EUR60K in cost. Zero daily users. The most expensive screensaver I've ever seen.
Read →The Data Lineage Maturity Model (4 Stages)
You can't fix what you can't trace. Here's the 4-stage lineage maturity model.
Read →The Deployment Pipeline Concept Applied to Data Products
Your data team deploys to production the same way software teams did in 2008. Manually, nervously, with a 1000-step runbook nobody trusts.
Read →The Series B Rescue - Making Data Investor-Ready in 10 Weeks
Due diligence will find your data problems before you do. One company found out the hard way.
Read →CALMS for Data Organizations
The DevOps Handbook has a framework called CALMS. Most data teams only do the A. Here's what they're missing.
Read →Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling
Vertical scaling is adding RAM. Horizontal scaling is adding servers. One has a ceiling. One doesn't.
Read →Data Platform Teams Are Becoming Product Teams
Nobody adopts a pipeline. They adopt a product. That's what most data teams still don't get.
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.