Notes on dataarchitecture.

Short essays on architecture, cost, hiring and AI: one cartoon, one idea, most days of the week. No tutorials, no listicles.

One pipeline quietly consumed a full data engineer. On a team of 5, that's 20% of capacity feeding one job.

A 60-person scaleup asked me to design their data mesh. After the readiness check, we kept the central team.

An ETL cost audit cut a small team's bill by roughly a third. Same 4 patterns I always find.

Tech debt gets a backlog and a budget. Leadership debt gets a shrug, and it compounds faster.

DORA has applied since January 2025. The data plumbing behind its incident reports is missing at most FinTechs I see.

On one team, engineers reported their own near-misses weekly. Incidents dropped within a quarter.

BigQuery vs Snowflake for ad-hoc work comes down to one choice: pay per scan or pay per minute.

The DORA metrics are over a decade old, proven on software teams, and unused on most data teams I meet.

Before the term sheet, a CTO asked for a modularity audit. The feared rewrite turned out to be 6 seams.

The data lake had 300 datasets and no owner list. The audit notice gave us 4 months.

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.