Notes on dataarchitecture.
Short essays on architecture, cost, hiring and AI: one cartoon, one idea, most days of the week. No tutorials, no listicles.
Governance Added Late Fix
The data lake had 300 datasets and no owner list. The audit notice gave us 4 months.
Read →DE Compensation Trends EU
A client budgeted 2024 salaries for a 2026 data engineer role. The vacancy is now in month six.
Read →Iceberg Is Open. Your Security Model Isn't
An auditor asked who could read the customer table. With three engines on one Iceberg catalog, nobody could answer.
Read →Fractional Positioning For BE Startups
A CTO said "that's exactly us" four minutes into the call. The pitch was a description of his company.
Read →Cost Of No Data Contracts
A team of 8 data engineers spent roughly 30% of their week negotiating schema changes in Slack.
Read →AI Modeling Crisis Patterns
Every failed RAG project I've reviewed had the same upstream issue: nobody modeled the data underneath it.
Read →Series A To B Stack Pivot
The warehouse that carried you to Series A can quietly become the wrong one by Series B.
Read →Hiring Retention Via Culture Fit
We changed one screening step and two senior data engineers are still there, past year two.
Read →EU Reg Overlap Decision Aid
We mapped NIS2, DORA and GDPR incident duties for one client. One incident record fed all three.
Read →Data Product Canvas Update For AI Consumers
Your newest data consumers don't file tickets. They're AI agents, and they break differently.
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.