Data Platform

Many data platforms start with a change data capture (CDC) service to extract data from an organisations transactional databases - the source of truth for their most valuable data.

How many alerts do you get every day?

And how many of them are actionable?

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.

David Jayatillake published an interesting post recently titled “We don’t need data contracts”. The title was enough to ensure it caught plenty of attention… but the subtitle more accurately describes what David is arguing for: “We need data to be part of product engineering”.

If you want your users to use the tools you are building or onboarding, it’s important to implement them exactly where they expect them to be.

The definition and evolution of the data contract should be a collaboration between the data producers and the data consumers.

An article that has stayed with me since it was published back in 2015 is Dan McKinley’s Choose Boring Technology.

Robert Sahlin wrote a nice post on the data platform at MatHem, a Swedish retailer.

Over on Medium I’ve published a post about a contract-based data platform, which is an updated version of my post to this newsletter back in December.

A few months back Whatnot published a great post on how they are using data contracts.