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You Can't Incentivise a Pipeline That Doesn't Break

I worked alongside a data engineer who was, by every formal measure, the best performer on the team. He was also quietly destroying the platform. Not maliciously. He was optimising for the thing being measured. His work shipped fast because he skipped the edge case analysis. He closed tickets at first resolution without ever checking whether the underlying pattern would recur. He didn’t review anyone else’s PRs (not his KPIs, so why would he?).

Saturday, July 4, 2026 Read
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Your Team Already Has Patterns. They Just Don't Know It.

When I started a new role, one of the first things I did was try to understand how data moved through the system. Not the dashboards, not the data models — the pipes. Where did things come from? How did they get in? What happened to them along the way? There were somewhere between twenty and thirty source systems feeding the platform. Not a massive number, but enough to tell a story when you looked at the ingestion layer all at once. What I found was that all the pipelines had originated from two base templates. A sensible starting point. The kind of thing a small team puts in place early to stop complete chaos.

Saturday, June 27, 2026 Read
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Why Your Ideas Die in Planning Meetings

The silence that kills good ideas One morning, I sat in yet another meeting where we just spent two weeks backfilling a table then we found it was riddled with issues with the data. Even if we resolve the issue, it would then be another 2 weeks to backfill the data, there has to be a better way. “So, what do we think? Give me your best ideas for tackling this.”

Wednesday, January 7, 2026 Read
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The Invisible PR You're Building Right Now

The Email That Changed Everything I received a meeting invite labeled “Check In” and it was to discuss news about the restructure. In a few months, my role would be gone. I was still processing it, sitting with that particular brand of numbness that comes when your career gets upended. In the following weeks, my inbox started filling up. LinkedIn messages. Texts. Emails from people I’d worked with years ago.

Monday, December 8, 2025 Read