Writing

Notes

Architecture notes: patterns I design with, and lessons from building data and AI systems.

AllAgentic AIBigQueryCDCData catalogData contractsDatabricksDataplexDelta LakeDelta SharingDuckDB or BigQueryFinOpsGCP projectsGenAIGoogle CloudGovernanceHashingIAMIcebergLLM APIsLakehouseMCPMultiple LLM APIsObject storagePaired statisticsPostgresPythonRAGSecret ManagerSecurityStreamingUnity CatalogVector search
• Nov 2026

  Agents and MCP: giving AI tools without giving away the keys

  The Model Context Protocol standardises how agents reach tools and data. Governance is still your job.

  1 min read · Agentic AI · MCP · Security

• Nov 2026

  BigQuery cost and performance: the levers that actually matter

  Partitioning, clustering, the on-demand vs Editions decision, and the query habits that decide most of the bill.

  1 min read · BigQuery · FinOps · Google Cloud

• Nov 2026

  Change data capture into BigQuery, without the surprises

  Getting operational changes into the warehouse in minutes: capture, ordering, merging and the cost traps.

  1 min read · CDC · BigQuery · Streaming

• Nov 2026

  Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg and the open lakehouse

  Open table formats let several engines share one copy of data. What they give you, and the decisions that matter more than the format.

  1 min read · Lakehouse · Delta Lake · Iceberg

• Nov 2026

  RAG on enterprise data: an architecture checklist

  Retrieval-augmented generation works when retrieval is treated as a data problem: permissions, freshness and evaluation first.

  1 min read · GenAI · RAG · Vector search

• Nov 2026

  Governing a Databricks lakehouse with Unity Catalog

  One catalog for tables, files, models and permissions, and the decisions to make before teams start creating things.

  1 min read · Databricks · Unity Catalog · Governance

• Oct 2026

  Domain Data Mesh Migration

  Move from a central data platform to domain-owned data products without losing governance: tag, migrate in waves, keep policies shared.

  1 min read · BigQuery · GCP projects · Data catalog

• Oct 2026

  Blind LLM Evaluation

  Choose between models, prompts or documents with pre-registered criteria, anonymised inputs, repeated judging and order-swapped head-to-heads.

  1 min read · Multiple LLM APIs · Python · Paired statistics

• Oct 2026

  Governed Agent Operations

  Let LLM agents act, but only through contracts, a write-ahead journal, risk tiers and a human gate, watched by a supervisor that can only read.

  1 min read · LLM APIs · MCP · Postgres

• Oct 2026

  Cross-Cloud Lakehouse Disaster Recovery

  Keep a governed, warm copy of a Delta lakehouse in a second cloud, with recovery objectives you can rehearse and measure.

  1 min read · Databricks · Delta Sharing · Unity Catalog

• Oct 2026

  Point-in-Time Correct Data

  Make every past answer reproducible: record when data became known, query as of that moment, and stop the pipeline when data can't be trusted.

  1 min read · DuckDB or BigQuery · Object storage · Data contracts