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Strategy Jul 12, 2026

Seven Investigation Tools, 45 Million Companies, One Weekend

We keep telling clients their AI project is really a data project, and that with the right semantic layer underneath, everything on top gets fast and cheap to build. So we proved it. Over a weekend we pointed Saiku and Ossie at 45 million companies of public beneficial-ownership data and built seven investigation tools on top: a live ownership graph, dashboards, a risk radar, cross-border flows, plain-English querying and a case desk. One model underneath; every surface almost free. Here's what each piece does and how they fit.

Data Strategy Entity Resolution AI Analytics

RegTech & Compliance Jul 9, 2026

Build vs Buy Sanctions Screening: A Compliance Leader's Framework

The right answer is almost never pure build or pure buy. It is a hybrid, and the way you draw the line determines whether your platform survives an OFAC audit and whether the vendor bill stops eating your budget.

Sanctions Screening Build vs Buy RegTech Compliance

Private Equity Jul 9, 2026

The Operating Partner's Technology Playbook: From Close to Exit

How PE operating partners should think about technology as a value-creation lever. What to read in diligence, what to do in the first 100 days, what to leave alone during hold, and what to fix before exit.

Private Equity Technical Due Diligence Fractional Leadership Engineering Leadership

AI Engineering Jul 8, 2026

How Do I Get Better LLM Uptime? A Reliability Playbook for AI in Production

Most LLM outages are not caused by the model. They are caused by the pipeline around the model. The retries, the routing, the fallbacks, the rate limits, the observability. A concrete playbook for hitting three-nines on an LLM-powered product.

LLMOps AI DevOps AI Strategy

All Articles

Cloud Architecture Aug 25, 2026

What to Use Instead of AWS QLDB: An Audit-Grade Ledger in Postgres

AWS quietly killed Quantum Ledger Database, and its own migration advice points at Postgres. Here's the append-only, audit-grade ledger we actually build there, what you get for free, and the one thing you have to add back by hand.

Databases Postgresql Compliance Data Engineering

Supply Chain Security Jul 14, 2026

Zero-CVE in Ten Minutes: Migrating a Go Service to Chainguard Images

Most container vulnerabilities have nothing to do with your code, they come from the base image. Here's the migration I reach for: rebuild a normal Go service on Chainguard Images and watch the CVE count fall to near zero, plus the friction most tutorials skip.

Supply Chain Security Security DevOps Kubernetes

Cloud Architecture Jul 13, 2026

Orbital Data Centres: SpaceX's Big Bet Still Has an Economics Problem

This week's AI Briefing: an Altman, Musk exchange about SpaceX being worth more than the planet turned into the more interesting question underneath it, can you actually run AI inference in orbit, and does the maths close? Not yet, and here's why.

Space Infrastructure Cloud Architecture AI AI Strategy

Cloud Architecture Jul 6, 2026

Multi-Cloud Is Usually Overkill

Multi-cloud promises resilience but usually delivers doubled cost and complexity for an outage that may never come. A look at the DNS trap, AWS's 300+ SLAs, the October 2025 US-EAST-1 outage, and why multi-region discipline beats a second provider.

Multi-Cloud Cloud Architecture Cloud Migration DevOps

Strategy Jul 3, 2026

AWS Summit DC: The AI Tag Isn't a Strategy

Two days at AWS Summit in Washington, DC, big, well attended, informative, and underwhelming. In the rush to bolt an LLM onto everything, a lot of vendors forgot to do anything novel. Notes on what impressed, what didn't, and why it's still the data that decides the outcome.

AI Strategy AI Data Strategy Supply Chain Security

Strategy May 22, 2026

Build vs Hire vs Consultancy for Your MVP: How to Pick Without Lying to Yourself

Most founders agonise over which option is 'right' for their MVP. They're usually not the same option, the trade-offs are concrete, and the worst case is the hybrid that tries to be all three.

MVP Startups Build vs Buy Product Strategy

Strategy May 22, 2026

Cloud Stack Decisions for Early-Stage Startups: What Actually Matters

Most early-stage cloud stack debates are arguments about the wrong question. The tool doesn't matter nearly as much as the cost of switching, who fixes it at 3am, and whether your second engineer can read it.

Startups Cloud Architecture Product Strategy DevOps

Tips May 22, 2026

Entity Resolution in Postgres: Trigrams, Jaro-Winkler, and Vector Embeddings Compared

Deduping messy real-world data, companies, addresses, people, looks like a solved problem until you do it. Here's an honest comparison of the three techniques that actually matter inside Postgres, when each one wins, and where each one quietly breaks.

Entity Resolution Databases Data Engineering Machine Learning

Strategy May 22, 2026

Most Platform Builds Fail Before the First Commit

Platforms rarely flounder because the engineering was bad. They flounder because nobody agreed what was being built. Scope, requirements, and real customer collaboration decide the outcome long before code does.

Product Strategy Engineering Leadership MVP Startups

Strategy May 22, 2026

What a Fractional Director of Engineering Actually Does (Day-to-Day, Not on a Slide)

Most people googling 'fractional Director of Engineering' aren't sure what they're hiring. Here's the honest read on the work, the cadence, and the four shapes of engagement, written by someone who's spent more than a decade doing it.

Fractional Leadership Engineering Leadership Team Structure Technical Due Diligence

Strategy May 22, 2026

What Actually Kills Cloud Migrations (And What People Blame Instead)

Most failed cloud migrations are blamed on the cloud bill, the vendor, or the consultancy. The real cause is almost always the same thing, and it's not technical.

Cloud Migration Legacy Modernisation Cloud Architecture Engineering Leadership

Strategy May 22, 2026

Why Your AI Project Is Actually a Data Project (and What That Costs You)

Most AI projects fail in the data layer, not the model layer. The slide deck is about agents and RAG; the work that decides the outcome is unglamorous data engineering nobody scoped or staffed.

Data Engineering AI Entity Resolution Data Strategy

Tips May 18, 2026

What Apache Arrow Actually Did To Mondrian, And What It Didn't

After replacing Mondrian's SQL emitter with Calcite, the next obvious target was the data path itself: an Apache Arrow segment cache and ADBC connections to replace JDBC. The first benchmarks said Arrow was 2.6x slower. They were wrong, but not for the reasons I expected. Here's the honest report on where columnar wins, where it ties, and where it actually loses.

Data Engineering Databases Analytics Open Source

Strategy May 14, 2026

Rebuilding Saiku: Bringing a Commercial Open Source OLAP Tool Back With AI

Years ago I walked away from Saiku, the commercial open source OLAP tool I'd built and run for the better part of a decade. This year, with a few weeks off and an agentic coding agent at my disposal, I rebuilt it, new UI, modernised dependencies, and a new SQL engine underneath. Here's what happened, and why I'm releasing it again.

Open Source Analytics AI Legacy Modernisation

Strategy Apr 15, 2026

AI Won't Replace Your Engineers. But It Will Expose Your Lack of Engineering Leadership.

Every week there's a new headline about AI replacing software engineers. The data tells a different story, and the real gap it's exposing isn't in code production, it's in engineering leadership.

Engineering Leadership AI AI Strategy Fractional Leadership

Strategy Feb 16, 2026

Not All AI Is Created Equal: Three Questions That Separate Signal from Noise

Every product now has an 'AI' badge, but slapping a label on a fridge doesn't make it intelligent. Three critical questions separate leaders who understand AI from everyone else buying stickers.

AI AI Strategy Machine Learning Product Strategy

Cloud Architecture Feb 3, 2026

SpaceX Acquires xAI: What Orbital Data Centers Mean for Cloud Architecture

Musk's $1.25 trillion merger isn't just corporate consolidation, it's a fundamental bet that terrestrial infrastructure can't scale to meet AI demand. For systems architects, the implications are significant.

Cloud Architecture Space Infrastructure AI Multi-Cloud

Strategy Dec 14, 2025

The Trio Model: A Practical Approach to Business-IT Dysfunction

When IT becomes a bottleneck and shadow solutions proliferate, structural reorganization won't fix misalignment. The Trio model offers a practical collaboration pattern for small teams navigating high-pressure environments.

Team Structure Engineering Leadership Product Strategy Technical Debt

Strategy Dec 10, 2025

Anthropic's Bun Acquisition: Why AI Giants Are Moving Down the Stack

Anthropic's acquisition of Bun isn't just another dev tool purchase, it's a signal that AI companies are done relying on external infrastructure. When you own the model, the dev tools, and the runtime, you control the entire coding experience.

AI Strategy AI Developer Experience Open Source

Cloud Infrastructure Nov 7, 2025

SpaceX Orbital Data Centers with Starlink V3: 2026 Status & Outlook

SpaceX is turning Starlink V3 satellites into the backbone of orbital data centers, terabit-class capacity per satellite, an FCC filing for one million units, and a $1.25 trillion SpaceX-xAI merger funding the buildout.

Space Infrastructure Cloud Architecture AI Multi-Cloud

Strategy Jan 14, 2025

The Essential Guide to Cloud Migration: Navigating Your Digital Transformation

A comprehensive cloud migration roadmap for 2025, covering foundational assessment through legacy system decommissioning, migration strategies, planning, execution, and long-term success factors.

Cloud Migration Cloud Architecture Legacy Modernisation Build vs Buy

Research Jan 14, 2025

From Quantum to AI: The Future of Cloud Computing

Explore transformative trends reshaping cloud computing, from serverless evolution and AI integration to quantum computing and generative AI.

Cloud Architecture AI Quantum Computing Multi-Cloud

Information Nov 27, 2024

Quest for New Banking Security

Concept to Cloud partnered with Consilient to engineer a secure cross-bank fraud detection system using federated learning, overcoming strict banking security requirements and data inconsistencies.

Machine Learning Data Engineering Security RegTech

Strategy Oct 25, 2024

Beyond ChatGPT: Why Great Documentation Still Rules Developer Success

Despite the rise of AI assistants like ChatGPT, well-crafted technical documentation remains essential for developer success. Compare AWS and Azure documentation approaches.

Documentation Developer Experience Cloud Architecture Multi-Cloud

Research Oct 14, 2024

Ultimate Guide to Cloud Based Research

Explore how cloud computing transforms collaborative research by enabling seamless data sharing and real-time teamwork across distributed global teams.

Cloud Architecture Data Engineering Analytics Open Source

Tips Aug 12, 2024

Cloud First Concepts

Explore cloud-first architectural principles for startups and small teams. Learn why building applications with cloud-native services reduces operational overhead and total cost of ownership.

Cloud Architecture Cloud Migration Startups DevOps

Tips Aug 7, 2024

How long does it take?

Explore the complexities of determining project timelines, specifically examining deployment and prototype development phases in cloud environments.

MVP Startups Product Strategy Cloud Migration

Tips Aug 7, 2024

Should I be using Kubernetes?

Examine whether Kubernetes is the right choice for your infrastructure needs. Learn when Kubernetes excels and when simpler alternatives like Docker Compose, AWS ECS, or Google Cloud Run make more sense.

Kubernetes DevOps Cloud Architecture Multi-Cloud

Tips Aug 7, 2024

Taking a Concept and Running with It

Explore the process of transforming business ideas into deployable prototypes and MVPs. Learn the critical questions founders and project managers should ask when bringing concepts to market.

MVP Startups Build vs Buy Product Strategy

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