Notes on data, AI, IT
and security
No marketing fog. The way I think about real problems with founders and managers.
GitHub Copilot and the start of mass AI-assisted development
What the GitHub Copilot launch means for companies that hire developers and manage engineering teams.
Why cloud migrations run long: three systemic reasons
Cloud migrations almost always take longer than planned. Three causes I see consistently, and how to work with them.
Streaming data processing: does your company need it
What streaming data processing is, how it differs from batch processing, and in which real situations it is a justified choice.
Colonial Pipeline: when cybersecurity becomes physical resilience
A breakdown of the Colonial Pipeline attack for managers: why the incident changes the security conversation for companies with physical infrastructure.
Transformer moves beyond NLP: what it means
The transformer architecture that reshaped text processing is beginning to work with images and structured data. What this means for business.
API as a product: why internal integrations fall apart
How the approach to internal APIs affects the reliability of the whole architecture, and why an internal client deserves no less respect than an external one.
Feature flags in production: the promise and the maintenance debt
Feature flags let you ship safely and experiment cheaply - but every flag you add is a piece of logic you have to eventually remove.
Data catalog: what it gives you and when you can skip it
A practical look at a data registry: what it delivers, when it justifies the investment, and when it is premature complexity.
Hafnium and Exchange: the patch that waited too long
The March 2021 Microsoft Exchange mass exploitation showed that patch management is not a technical task - it is an organisational one.
MLOps: the gap between experiment and production
Why most ML experiments never reach production, and what to do about it at the organisational level.
SolarWinds: a supply chain attack explained for managers
What happened with SolarWinds, and why this incident changes the security conversation for companies that do not think of themselves as targets.
Kubernetes for small business: when orchestration is overkill
Why complex infrastructure often slows small teams down, and how to match the level of complexity to the actual task.