About

I'm a data engineer with ~10 years building and operating real big-data systems, mostly from scratch rather than off the shelf. Tools accelerate your time to go-live, but they're hard to maintain and the bill comes due later.

This site is where I write about the problems underneath the tools — bad data, schema imposition, ingestion loss, cost, the unglamorous groundwork — and the tradeoffs each one forces. No silver bullets here.