Ship the first slice yourself
An architecture is a hypothesis until code runs. I build the first vertical slice with my own hands — then it becomes a teaching artefact, not a diagram.
About
The kind of architect who still gets paged
I'm David Lawson, a data and solution architect based in the UK. For eighteen years I've done the same job with steadily better titles: understand a business well enough to give its data a shape, build that shape with a team, and make sure the team ends up stronger than the platform.
The industry calls it player coach. In practice it means I refuse to choose between the two halves of the job. I design the target architecture and write the first ingestion job. I run the design authority and sit in the pairing sessions. I've found no other way to keep architecture honest — feedback from your own code is the only feedback that doesn't flatter you.
The other conviction: growing people is the highest-leverage work in engineering. A platform decays from the day it ships. An engineer you've coached into confidence compounds for decades. My proudest artefacts aren't systems — they're the six engineers who've gone on to senior roles and the two who now argue with me, correctly, in design reviews.
0+ years in data engineering & architecture
0+ engineers mentored across four organisations
0 mentees promoted into senior/lead roles
0 mentees who now out-argue me (the goal)
How I work
Four rules I actually follow
Decisions are for giving away
Every decision I make is one the team can’t practise making. I keep the two-way-door decisions moving through other people, loudly, on purpose.
Boring technology, interesting problems
Novelty budget is real. Spend it on the problem that makes your platform different, not on the seventh orchestrator of your career.
Documentation is a love letter
To the engineer at 2am, six months from now. ADRs, runbooks, and diagrams that admit what we don’t know yet.
Career
Where the scars are from
Names lightly fictionalised, lessons painfully real.
- 2021 — now
Principal Data & Solution Architect · Meridian Grid
Own the data architecture for a smart-meter analytics platform ingesting 40TB/day. Still on the on-call rota by choice. Built the mentoring scheme that has since put six engineers into senior roles.
- 2017 — 2021
Lead Data Architect · Coldharbour Finance
Led the migration of a 200-table on-prem warehouse to a cloud lakehouse without missing a single regulatory submission. Wrote the ingestion framework in year one, handed every piece of it away by year three.
- 2014 — 2017
Data Architect · Brindle Retail Group
First architecture role. Designed the event-driven stock platform, learned the hard way that a beautiful design nobody understands is a liability, and started coaching as self-defence.
- 2010 — 2014
Senior Data Engineer · two startups
Streaming pipelines before it was cool, dimensional modelling when it was deeply uncool, and one production outage I still tell juniors about so they feel better about theirs.
- 2008 — 2010
Graduate Developer · somewhere with a mainframe
COBOL adjacency, batch windows, and a database administrator called Maureen who taught me more about data integrity than any book since.
Toolbox
Years in production
Not a skills matrix — years each tool has actually carried production traffic with my name on the commit history.
SQL & dimensional modelling 18y
Python (pipelines, dbt, tooling) 14y
Cloud data platforms (AWS/Azure) 11y
Streaming (Kafka & friends) 9y
TypeScript (and this site) 5y
A typical week
Where the hours go
One square per percent. The first row is the point: an architect's calendar should have code in it.