Field notes
Notes from teams
who ship data systems.
Engineering deep-dives, strategy essays, and the occasional case study — all written by the people doing the work. No filler, no thought-leadership theatre.
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6 essays across 5 topics.
LLMs in production: the boring parts nobody demos
Demos are easy. Production is evals, observability, fallbacks, and a budget. A field guide to the unglamorous 80% of shipping language models that actually decides whether you ship.
Data pipelines that don't page you at 2am
Reliability isn't a vibe. It's a small set of decisions made early — idempotency, contracts, and the right kind of alerting. Here's the shape of a pipeline that sleeps through the night.
Computer vision on the factory floor: a 6-week case study
A real engagement: defect detection on a high-speed bottling line, from problem framing to production deployment, with the numbers and the wrong turns included.
Build vs buy in 2026: a decision framework that actually decides
The build-vs-buy debate has gotten harder, not easier, as the AI tooling layer has exploded. A four-question framework that cuts through the noise.
The quiet rise of causal inference in product analytics
A/B tests are the gold standard you can't always run. Causal inference is no longer a research toy — it's the practical tool teams reach for when randomization isn't on the table.
One essay a month. No filler.
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