Notes on dataarchitecture.

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

The best data engineers move for ownership and a manager who can describe the strategy. A 10% bump alone rarely does it.

The team bought more tokens. The agent still gave confident, wrong answers. The bottleneck was never compute.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.