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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.

Apr 23, 2026 Uncategorized

AI is writing data quality tests now. That's not replacing you-it's multiplying

AI is generating data quality tests now. Not replacing you. Multiplying what you can realistically cover.

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Apr 22, 2026 Technical Debt

The Dashboard That Took 3 Months: A Process Problem, Not a Complexity Problem

An executive requested a simple revenue dashboard. Three months later, it was live. It should've taken four weeks. Here's what went wrong at …

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Apr 21, 2026 Architecture

Fitness Functions: Testing Your Architecture Like Code

You test your code. You test your data. But who tests your architecture? Here's how fitness functions change that.

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Apr 20, 2026 Technical Debt & Economics

The 306K Per Million Lines: What Technical Debt Actually Costs

Nobody budgets for technical debt. But it budgets itself - in slow changes, frequent bugs, and engineers who quit.

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Apr 19, 2026 Organizational Dynamics

The Hybrid Governance Rollout: From Bottleneck to Balance in 12 Weeks

Every governance rebuild I've seen starts the same way: a team that over-corrected once, then over-corrected the other way, and is now tired …

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Apr 18, 2026 Technical Debt & Economics

Status Quo Is Never Free: Why Your 'Do Nothing' Option Has the Biggest Hidden Price

"Do nothing" is never free. One client's "zero cost" status quo was burning 200K a year in workarounds nobody tracked.

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Apr 17, 2026 Data Architecture & Strategy

CAP Per Workload: Why One Consistency Model Doesn't Fit Your Whole Platform

Treating finance and customer analytics like the same workload is how you end up with a platform that serves neither well.

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Apr 16, 2026 Data Architecture & Strategy

The Rise of Data SRE: Reliability Engineering for Data Platforms

Your data pipelines run in production. But nobody treats them like production systems. That's about to change.

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Apr 15, 2026 Data Architecture & Strategy

Observability Turned Our Senior Engineers Back Into Builders

Six months ago our senior engineers were firefighters. Now they're builders again. The change wasn't a reorg. It was observability.

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Apr 14, 2026 Data Architecture & Strategy

The Data Maturity Assessment You Can Do in 30 Minutes

Most maturity assessments take six weeks and a consulting firm. This one takes 30 minutes and a whiteboard.

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