Why This Blog
Slide decks are easy. Production is hard.
Most architecture looks flawless until it meets a real-world workload. This blog is a running log of the wins, the expensive mistakes, and the design choices that actually survived scaling. I write about building data platforms and AI infrastructure for people who have to maintain what they build.
Data Engineering: Systems That Stay Up
From SQL Server to Delta Lake to Fabric, I’ve lived through the messy middle: schema drift, rising costs, broken pipelines, and “just one more linked service.”
These posts focus on:
- Lakehouse patterns that scale without constant rebuilds
- Schema-on-read vs schema-on-write in the real world
- Synapse, Fabric, OneLake – what you gain and what you lose
- Security and identity as architectural decisions, not afterthoughts
Read if you care about:
operability, governance, and long-term sanity.
Engineering AI: Beyond the Prompt
I’m not interested in prompt tricks.
I’m interested in what happens when AI can execute code, touch infrastructure, and make irreversible changes.
These posts explore:
- AI agents as operators, not chatbots
- Containers as blast-radius control
- CI-driven agent workflows
- Why guardrails matter more than “intelligence”
Read if you care about:
using AI without trusting it blindly.
Productivity Without the Hype
“5× developer” claims sound great – until you inherit the code.
This section is about building systems that make you consistently effective, not occasionally fast.
Topics include:
- Objects vs functions in real automation scripts
- Dev containers and reproducible environments
- Why almost-right code is worse than slow code
- Using AI as a reviewer, not an author
Read if you care about:
maintainability, readability, and future-you.
Owning the Stack (Because Abstraction Has a Cost)
Cloud is powerful – and dangerously good at hiding complexity.
Self-hosting and home labs aren’t nostalgia projects; they’re how you learn what cloud services are actually doing on your behalf.
These posts cover:
- Docker-first self-hosting
- Networking, storage, and identity fundamentals
- Replacing subscriptions with systems you understand
- Building intuition that transfers back to the cloud
Read if you care about:
mastery, sovereignty, and understanding what you pay for.