Notes on data, AI, IT
and security
No marketing fog. The way I think about real problems with founders and managers.
Team contracts: APIs and data cannot run on trust alone
Why internal interfaces require explicit expectations - around structure, quality, and how changes are handled.
The event log as source of truth: why event-driven beats point-to-point integration
How shifting from bilateral API calls to a shared event journal simplifies system coupling and removes the fragility of double-writes.
Docker changes the conversation about delivery: the repeatable environment matters more than the container
Containerization is first and foremost a delivery discipline, not a new way to package an application.
Least privilege in practice: why access needs to shrink, not just grow faster
Granting access without managing its lifecycle is convenient right up until the moment it becomes a real business risk.
The Adobe breach as a lesson in password storage and the cost of old schemes
What the large-scale 2013 breach tells us about the price of outdated secrets storage and how companies respond to incidents.
Edge before it was called edge: what to compute at the machine, what to send to the center
Reaction time, latency, and network reliability demand different places for computation. How to think about distributing logic between a device and a central system.
Reinforcement learning and Atari: not about games, but about a class of problems
Why DeepMind's results on a games console matter not for entertainment, but as a signal about a whole class of optimization problems in business.
Business continuity for SaaS: when someone else's service becomes your operational backbone
SaaS speeds up business, but it does not remove the obligation to prepare for failures. How to think about dependencies on external services.
Questions the board should ask after the surveillance disclosures
Backup, jurisdiction, logging, contracts, operator access - what leadership needs to verify after the PRISM story.
After PRISM: the cloud is no longer just a cost question
The NSA surveillance disclosure turned trust in cloud providers from a technical question into a political and legal one.
Experiments and A/B thinking: what digital products can teach everyone else
Not every decision needs a year-long project. Some of them should be tested with fast, cheap experiments - even in non-digital environments.
Data scientist, analyst, engineer: it is time to tell the roles apart
Why 'data person' is no longer a precise enough role, and how blurred expectations sink teams before work even begins.