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Notes on dataarchitecture.

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

May 28, 2026 Technical Debt & Economics

FinOps Isn't a Dashboard. It's Architecture.

Nobody chose to keep 7 years of event logs. The default did. You've paid for it every month since.

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May 28, 2026 Technical Debt & Economics

The Agent That Can Say I Don't Know

The cheapest AI safety feature in 2026: "I don't have current data."

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May 27, 2026 Technical Debt & Economics

The Lift-and-Shift Lie

The cloud migration finished in March. By July the bill was 3x and nothing was faster.

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May 26, 2026 Organizational Dynamics

Ownership Vacuum After First Hire

The junior left in March. In May, marketing's dashboard broke and nobody knew who to call.

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May 25, 2026 Data Architecture

Idempotency In Orchestration Failures

Your pipeline failed at 3am. The on-call engineer is now paid to clean up duplicates.

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May 24, 2026 Technical Debt & Economics

Hard Credit Caps On Cloud DWH Spend

Resource Monitors are uncomfortable on purpose. That's why they save money.

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May 23, 2026 Organizational Dynamics

DORA Metrics For Data Pipelines

The DORA metrics work for data teams. Most data teams aren't measuring them.

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May 22, 2026 Data Architecture

Conway's Law Pipeline Silos

Two teams sitting in different Slack channels build two pipelines that compute the same metric.

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May 21, 2026 Technical Debt & Economics

NIS2 Reporting For Data Incidents

NIS2, DORA, and GDPR each want an incident report. Send the same one.

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May 20, 2026 Technical Debt & Economics

The Batch Window That Ate A Weekend

The six-hour batch was eating one engineer's weekend every two weeks. Nobody had measured it.

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