Notes on dataarchitecture.

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

ROI Measures For Pipelines

We scored a client's pipelines on cost against consumption. About 1 in 5 had a monthly bill and zero consumers.

We scored a client's pipelines on cost against consumption. About 1 in 5 had a monthly bill and zero consumers.

Four questions, asked consistently, replaced most of one engineering manager's architecture decisions.

Duplicate invoices came from the recovery, not the outage. The retry replayed 40 minutes into a double-counting sink.

A company at 40 people needs senior data judgment about 2 days a week. Full-time is the wrong container.

Single-cloud is a fine strategy. Unpriced lock-in is a negotiating position, and not yours.

Nobody owned the orders table. Everyone had opinions about it in the incident channel.

Your engineers are already learning AI at work. The only question is whether it's sanctioned.

A failure that cost one dashboard last year now takes out 40 downstream jobs. The platform grew. The alerts didn't.

Half the "Head of Data" searches I see are two different jobs wearing one title.

Every AI roadmap I review gets the same first check: whether the data could go in a board deck unchecked.

No pitch. An honest conversation about whether I can help, and what shape it would take if I can.