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Notes from the field

Lessons from shipping AI and data platforms at scale, written for the leaders and engineers doing the work.

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Leadership

The Architecture of Engagement: What I Changed First, and in What Order

Taking over a large engineering organization where the systems were in better shape than the people: skip levels that had to close the loop, retiring the single points of failure without insulting the people who were them, mapping skill against interest, and a demo cadence that broke the silos.

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AI Platform

Building an Enterprise AI Platform: From Foundation to Production

Two quarters of platform work: a model-agnostic agentic framework, a unified MCP gateway, advanced retrieval where precision is the product, an evaluation system, self-service workflow onboarding, a governed data foundation and MLOps underneath it.

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MLOps

Industrializing Forecasts: MLOps for a Mixed Model Estate

A modelling estate of solvers, simulations, spreadsheets and one or two learned models, given a single operating discipline: a two-loop lifecycle hinged on a registry, run manifests that make a published number defensible years later, and a workflow extension that lets agents invoke any of it.

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Data Platforms

Four Platforms, One Lakehouse: Consolidating Data Without Stopping the Business

Merging four legacy platforms into a single AWS lakehouse: the sequencing, the governance that made it work rather than taxed it, and why the org chart turned out to be harder than the architecture.

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Data Acquisition

One Runner, Many Patterns: An AI-Driven Scraping Framework

Parallel collection stacks consolidated onto one configuration-driven runner: the pattern library underneath a large fleet, schema as a versioned contract, a selector resilience ladder instead of one-shot self-healing, a bought unblocking tier, agentic browser validation, and an agent that can draft a source but never activate one.

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Identity

Identity at Scale: Consolidating Four Login Systems Onto One Standard

Four authentication mechanisms from years of growth and acquisitions, consolidated onto OIDC, OAuth 2.0 and AWS Cognito: a translating SDK and facade, one unified token, social login that was impossible before, and a transparent migration of tens of millions of users.

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Architecture

Strangling the Monolith: Domain-Driven User, Profile and Personalization Services

Carving User, Profile and a graph-driven personalization service out of a monolith: domain-driven boundaries, DynamoDB modelled by access pattern rather than by entity, dual-sync, and a strangler-fig cutover run under production load.

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Reliability

Surviving Peak: Distributed Sessions, Load Shedding and a Priority Waiting Room

A sticky-session Java monolith that hung under holiday load: moving sessions into Redis as an L2 store, a beacon and control plane that made the load balancer health check tell the truth, cost-aware rate limiting, and a waiting room that queues by work already invested.

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