Notes on dataarchitecture.
Short essays on architecture, cost, hiring and AI: one cartoon, one idea, most days of the week. No tutorials, no listicles.
DE Compensation Trends EU
A client budgeted 2024 salaries for a 2026 data engineer role. The vacancy is now in month six.
Read →Iceberg Is Open. Your Security Model Isn't
An auditor asked who could read the customer table. With three engines on one Iceberg catalog, nobody could answer.
Read →Fractional Positioning For BE Startups
A CTO said "that's exactly us" four minutes into the call. The pitch was a description of his company.
Read →Cost Of No Data Contracts
A team of 8 data engineers spent roughly 30% of their week negotiating schema changes in Slack.
Read →AI Modeling Crisis Patterns
Every failed RAG project I've reviewed had the same upstream issue: nobody modeled the data underneath it.
Read →Series A To B Stack Pivot
The warehouse that carried you to Series A can quietly become the wrong one by Series B.
Read →Hiring Retention Via Culture Fit
We changed one screening step and two senior data engineers are still there, past year two.
Read →EU Reg Overlap Decision Aid
We mapped NIS2, DORA and GDPR incident duties for one client. One incident record fed all three.
Read →Data Product Canvas Update For AI Consumers
Your newest data consumers don't file tickets. They're AI agents, and they break differently.
Read →The Temporary Pipe That Stayed
A "temporary" sync script ran for 18 months. It was quietly eating 20% of the compute bill.
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.