21 articles tagged Dataengineering
Envelope encryption with cloud KMS: key rotation traps
How envelope encryption with cloud KMS breaks during key rotation, why wrapped data keys and key IDs must travel with ciphertext, and how to test it.
12 min read · 6 November 2026
KYC integrations: the data you shouldn't store
Design a KYC integration that persists only the decision and a vendor reference, with the raw identity evidence kept by the vendor under contract.
16 min read · 30 October 2026
Staging won't catch prod bugs. Make…
Why full parity between staging and production misses state-dependent bugs, and how to build cheap fault injection that catches them before deploy.
13 min read · 19 October 2026
PCI DSS architecture: 12 requirements that matter
Map PCI DSS requirements to concrete architecture decisions: CDE boundary, envelope encryption and key separation, immutable logging, CI/CD controls, and scope reduction.
14 min read · 19 October 2026
Senior engineer: the bar moved, nobody updated the rubric
Seniority signals shifted from code production to specification, review and judgement. How to rewrite interview rubrics to measure the work that now exists.
13 min read · 11 October 2026
Self-service AI tooling: the permission trap
Design self-service LLM layers so identity, context and budget controls prevent quiet permission failures instead of only working on the happy path.
14 min read · 9 October 2026
Core Web Vitals: what actually moves the needle
A decision framework for Core Web Vitals: read field distributions, find fixed costs that hit the slow tail, and verify changes with segmented RUM.
16 min read · 7 October 2026
DuckDB in production: when it replaces a warehouse
When an embedded columnar database beats a cloud warehouse for analytics, how to size it, and the failure modes that decide the boundary.
14 min read · 30 September 2026
CQRS: when it pays off and when it breaks
CQRS trades strong consistency for independent read and write scaling. Learn the failure modes, how to measure projection lag, and when a read replica is enough.
12 min read · 21 September 2026
Golden paths become load-bearing walls
Why thick internal SDKs for AI features become migration hazards, and how to design a thin runtime that enforces model ID, prompt version and embedding dimension.
13 min read · 21 September 2026
Local LLM agents: vLLM vs Ollama for fintech
Compare vLLM and Ollama for on-prem LLM agents in regulated fintech: concurrency, guided JSON, VRAM budgets, cost math, and a 30-minute test.
16 min read · 18 September 2026
Designing a Schema That Survives Embedding Model Upgrades
Why embedding columns break on model upgrades, how to version vectors, migrate legacy JSON payloads, and when to offload to a vector store.
11 min read · 13 September 2026
Foreign AI models vs sovereign fintech stacks: 2026 reality
How to choose between offshore LLM APIs and locally hosted inference for regulated fintech, with latency math, cost break-even, and a compliance checklist.
12 min read · 13 August 2026
African fintech agents: the compliance cliff most miss
How to design region-resident, queryable audit trails for autonomous fintech agents facing per-country latency, residency and retention rules.
10 min read · 12 August 2026
RAG rots if you don’t refresh indexes
RAG indexes rot when source documents change. Learn change detection, chunk versioning, and incremental refresh patterns, with code and a cost model.
15 min read · 4 August 2026
Poolers won’t save your serverless DB
Why poolers add latency and cost to bursty serverless workloads, and how multiplexing, the Aurora Data API, and direct connections compare.
14 min read · 19 July 2026
Observability for Long-Running LLM Agent Workflows
Design an observability stack for agentic LLM workloads: millisecond event timestamps, queue-depth metrics, and bounded buffering that survives outages.
14 min read · 17 July 2026
AI feature drift: why your model died at midnight
Diagnose nightly AI model drift and FeatureStoreKeyNotFound errors: tokenizer drift, memory fragmentation, and cold-start timeouts, with fixes.
14 min read · 7 July 2026
JSON mode's hidden costs revealed
LLM JSON mode guarantees syntax, not usable data. A two-stage extraction-plus-correction pipeline makes parsing reliable and cheap without fine-tuning.
12 min read · 3 July 2026
AI ate the niches first
A framework for judging whether a vertical SaaS product is defensible against free, integrated AI features, with code for auditing your own UI surface.
10 min read · 17 June 2026
Cutting cloud egress costs: architecture that works
Egress costs come from small, frequent cross-boundary calls. Learn the architecture patterns that reduce data transfer and how to verify savings.
13 min read · 11 June 2026