Notes on data, AI, IT
and security
No marketing fog. The way I think about real problems with founders and managers.
Chatbots: between the hype and the first practical use
In 2016 everyone is talking about chatbots. Here is where they actually work and where they are a marketing promise.
What Pokemon Go's outages teach about location data at scale
Pokemon Go is not a business application, but its infrastructure story in the summer of 2016 is a real lesson in what location data at scale actually costs.
Deployment frequency as a safety metric, not a speed metric
DevOps changes not only how fast code ships, but how risky each change is.
PostgreSQL JSONB: when you do not need a separate NoSQL database
Before adding MongoDB or another document store to your stack, it is worth checking what PostgreSQL's JSONB type can already do - and where it genuinely runs out.
Kafka as a data backbone: what it means for a company
Apache Kafka is no longer only a tool for large tech companies. How to explain its role without technical jargon.
API gateway: a team contract, not just a routing tool
Most API gateway conversations stay at the infrastructure level. The part that actually matters is what it forces teams to agree on before they write a line of code.
An encrypted backup is not a backup: what ransomware changed
Ransomware made the standard backup scheme insufficient. Here is exactly what to check.
Microservices and teams: why a service boundary is a responsibility boundary
Moving to microservices changes not just the architecture, but how teams negotiate contracts with each other.
Event log as source of truth: the business case
Event sourcing is not just an architecture pattern. It is a way to preserve the history of changes and give analytics an honest foundation.
TensorFlow and open source: what actually changed for companies
Why Google opening its ML framework shifts the conversation from 'we can't afford it' to 'we need data and an engineer'.
Containers in enterprise: where the pilot ends and the platform begins
Docker and containerisation have moved from hype to real deployments. I look at what it takes for a pilot to become an infrastructure platform.
Security incident response: who makes the decisions
During an incident there is no time to build a command chain on the fly. I look at what needs to be defined in advance and why this is a management question, not a technical one.