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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 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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Apr 12, 2026 Organizational Dynamics

The Data Quality Crisis: 67% of Executives Don't Trust Their Analytics

Executives stopped using the dashboards. They didn't trust the data. Here's how we rebuilt trust in 10 weeks.

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Apr 11, 2026 Data Architecture & Strategy

Wardley Mapping Your Data Stack (Build, Buy, or Outsource?)

Your custom Airflow setup is not a competitive advantage. Your customer analytics model might be.

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Apr 10, 2026 Data Architecture & Strategy

The Incremental Migration Strategy (Strangler Fig Pattern)

You don't migrate a data platform in one go. You grow the new one around the old one.

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Apr 9, 2026 Data Architecture & Strategy

Data Observability + Data Catalog: The Convergence

Your data team switches between four tools during an incident. That's about to change.

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Apr 8, 2026 Data Architecture & Strategy

The Data Contract That Saved a Product Launch

The data contract didn't save the launch. It saved the three days of firefighting that would have followed.

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Apr 7, 2026 Organizational Dynamics

The RACI Nobody Wants to Fill In (And Why That's the Problem)

Everyone agrees on "data ownership." Nobody agrees on who actually owns what.

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Apr 6, 2026 Organizational Dynamics

The Metadata Moment: When 'Where Is This Data?' Costs You Two Engineers

Two full-time equivalents on your data team do nothing but answer questions all day.

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Apr 5, 2026 Technical Debt & Economics

The Cloud Cost Optimization Sprint: 45% Reduction in 8 Weeks

This company was burning six figures a year on cloud data - we cut it by 45% in 8 weeks.

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Apr 4, 2026 Data Architecture & Strategy

Data Lineage: From 'Nice to Have' to 'Must Have

Without data lineage, every schema change is a game of "what did we just break."

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