Topic — 6 essays
Data Governance
Ownership, data contracts, lineage, quality, and the semantic layer — the agreements and accountability that decide whether an organization can trust its own numbers.
Field Notes
How to Build a Data Catalog That People Actually Use
A tool-neutral guide to building a data catalog: start from query logs, document the fifty tables that matter, assign owners, automate the rest — in that order.
02Field Notes
Data Observability vs Data Quality: What Each One Actually Catches
Data quality checks the rules you wrote; data observability watches for the failures you didn't anticipate. Neither replaces the other — here's the honest split.
03Field Notes
What Is Data Lineage, and What Is It Actually For?
Data lineage records where data comes from, how it's transformed, and where it goes. What it's genuinely for, impact analysis and root cause, and its limits.
04Field Notes
What Is a Data Catalog, and Do You Need One?
A data catalog is a searchable inventory of your data: what exists, where it lives, what it means, who owns it. What it's for, and when you actually need one.
05Essay
Most Data Quality Problems Are Org-Chart Problems
When data is wrong, teams buy a tool. But the durable causes are organizational: unclear ownership, misaligned incentives, no accountability. Tools miss those.
06Essay
Data Contracts Are a Cultural Problem
A schema check is the easy 10% of a data contract. The other 90% is an organizational agreement that no YAML file can enforce for you.