Notes on data, AI, IT
and security
No marketing fog. The way I think about real problems with founders and managers.
How architecture changes after large breaches and trust failures
Yahoo, LinkedIn, Dropbox - 2016 showed that breaches happen to everyone. Here is what this changes in how companies should think about trust architecture.
On-call rotation is a management problem, not an IT problem
Unstructured on-call duties burn out engineers and leave incidents without clear ownership. The fix is not a tool - it is a set of decisions that only management can make.
The enterprise case for a password manager, made simply
After another year of major credential breaches, the argument for a corporate password manager is no longer mainly technical. It is an operational risk argument.
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.