Notes on data, AI, IT
and security
No marketing fog. The way I think about real problems with founders and managers.
Open-source in robotics: ROS as a faster path to the first prototype
How an open stack lowers the cost of experimentation and shortens the road from idea to a working pilot.
Raw data layer before data lake: when it makes sense and how to keep it from becoming a swamp
Storing everything in one place is not a strategy. Without catalogs, owners, and metadata you do not get a lake - you get a swamp.
Backups against ransomware: prepare before it happens
A preventive look at backup discipline, offline copies, and recovery testing - while there is still time to do it calmly.
Columnar storage and a new pace of analytics: why a months-long data warehouse build is already strange
When analytics can be up and running in days rather than months, both business expectations and the right way to design storage change.
Remote contractors as a second risk perimeter
External engineers and integrators require just as much access discipline as full-time staff - often more.
You can no longer store everything: the economics of archives, logs, and history layers
Cheap disk lowers the cost of writing data, but not the cost of searching it, maintaining it, or understanding what is actually inside.
Predictive maintenance without the hype: start with failure history, not neural networks
Repair logs and the cost of downtime matter more than fashionable algorithms. Why failure data is the real first step.
OpenStack and private cloud: who gains leverage, and who just sinks in complexity
The real cost of running your own cloud infrastructure is processes, scale, and people - not just hardware.
Excel as shadow IT: banning it is pointless, rethinking the process is not
Spreadsheets live where corporate systems are too slow or too rigid. Here is what to do about that.
Data lineage: where the number in the report came from, and who owns it
Tracing metrics back to their source is not a technical nicety - it is the foundation of trust in analytics.
Text analytics without a silver bullet: where the real value is in reviews and tickets
Why processing customer text starts not with understanding language, but with routing and classifying reasons.
Voice versus search: what Siri teaches corporate knowledge bases
Users want an answer, not navigation through menus. Why voice interfaces are changing the requirements for internal knowledge systems.