Data Platform

You might have noticed how I keep using the word autonomy in these posts, for example a couple of days ago when writing about a contract-based data platform and yesterday when linking to lessons from BlaBlaCar. It might actually be my favourite word! And certainly guides how I think about the products we provide through our data platform.

This blog post from BlaBlaCar shares some great lessons - not just for implementing data mesh, but for any platform team looking to build products for internal stakeholders.

Data contracts are powerful enough you can build a data platform based on them - one that is more flexible and more effective than those we built before and promotes a more decentralised approach to data.

A few years ago I, as tech lead of a data platform team, proposed that we shouldn’t be building a data platform.

Reposting last weeks post on the IKEA effect to LinkedIn kicked off an interesting discussion on the complexities of build vs buy.

Data is at the heart of every meaningful service, and it’s the effective use of that data which builds a product, and a business.

We recently had an incident with our data pipeline, resulting in data being lost on route to our data platform. Of course, you never want an incident, but failures are a fact of life. What’s important is how you prepare for them and respond to them, and in that sense this was a great incident.