Notes on dataarchitecture.
Short essays on architecture, cost, hiring and AI: one cartoon, one idea, most days of the week. No tutorials, no listicles.
DORA Metrics For Data Pipelines
The DORA metrics work for data teams. Most data teams aren't measuring them.
Read →Conway's Law Pipeline Silos
Two teams sitting in different Slack channels build two pipelines that compute the same metric.
Read →NIS2 Reporting For Data Incidents
NIS2, DORA, and GDPR each want an incident report. Send the same one.
Read →The Batch Window That Ate A Weekend
The six-hour batch was eating one engineer's weekend every two weeks. Nobody had measured it.
Read →The Hiring Gap For Senior DEs
87% of tech leaders rate senior data engineer hiring as difficult. Most of them are bidding against AI startups.
Read →Westrum Culture In Data Teams
If your post-mortems start with "who shipped that," your org culture is the bug.
Read →AI Act Data Traceability Checklist
The AI Act compliance deadline is August 2026. Your SME doesn't need Atlan to make it.
Read →Contract-First Data For Cross-Team Handoffs
Most cross-team data fights are caused by an undocumented assumption upstream.
Read →Orchestration Tool Audit For Small Data Teams
Two-engineer data teams keep picking Airflow because it's "industry standard." Six months in, half the DAGs are commented out.
Read →Semantic Layer Is A Consistency Tool, Not A Speed Tool
A semantic layer is a consistency tool. Most teams buy it for speed and end up disappointed.
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.