Writing

Notes from the field

Long-form thinking on data platforms, architecture decisions, and growing engineers. Every diagram is a live component — scroll and they'll introduce themselves.

8 Jul 2026 · 8 min read

What Happens if We Run It Twice?: Idempotency as a Design Discipline

Every pipeline gets re-run — by a scheduler, a retry policy, or a colleague at 2am. Idempotency is the property that makes that boring. The principle, the four families of technique, and the one question that should be in every design review.

patternsreliabilitypipelines

7 Jul 2026 · 7 min read

Fan Out, Fan In: The Pattern You've Been Using Without Naming

Data engineering's favourite shape — split the work, run it in parallel, gather the results. What the pattern actually is, where it quietly runs your infrastructure, and why the fan-in is always the part that bites.

patternspipelinesarchitecture

30 Jun 2026 · 7 min read

How I Built This Site With AI (I'm Not a Designer)

I can't kern, I don't know what a French curve is, and my last design decision was "Bootstrap, I guess". This site looks like an agency built it. Here's exactly how, and what it says about the job of an architect now.

aisveltekitmeta

5 Jun 2026 · 8 min read

The Player-Coach Architect

Ivory-tower architecture fails quietly and expensively. A field guide to doing the job with your hands on the keyboard and your eyes on the team — and why mentoring is an architectural practice, not an HR one.

leadershipmentoringarchitecture

14 May 2026 · 7 min read

Event-Driven Architecture, Minus the Hype

Everyone wants an event backbone until they meet eventual consistency at 2am. What event-driven actually buys you, what it costs, and a decision framework I use with real teams.

architectureeventsintegration

12 May 2026 · 8 min read

Change Data Capture

Your database already keeps a perfect diary of everything that happens to it. CDC is the discipline of reading it. The general principles, the three ways to do it (two of them badly), and what the pattern becomes when it lands in a data lake.

cdcdata-lakepipelines

10 Apr 2026 · 8 min read

Migrating a Warehouse Without Stopping the Business

A 200-table regulatory warehouse, a cloud target, and a business that could not miss a single Monday submission. The dual-run playbook, the metrics that kept us honest, and the graph that got the CFO to sign.

migrationcase-studywarehousing

2 Mar 2026 · 9 min read

A Field Guide to Data Modelling Decisions

Star schema, One Big Table, or Data Vault? The honest trade-offs behind the three modelling styles every warehouse debate circles around — with the scoring rubric I use in design reviews.

data-modellingwarehousingsql