Field Briefs

Notes from the practice.

Short, opinionated field briefs on the patterns that have worked in production engagements. Architecture decisions, the four things to get right, the trade-offs we keep seeing.

7-Minute Read

CI/CDGitTerraformGitOpsAWSAgentic AI

A field guide to branch-per-environment CI/CD

The delivery model where merge is the only deploy verb — feature branches run Dev, main runs QA, a release branch runs Prod, and Terraform makes it true on every merge.

Most teams run two systems that disagree about what is deployed: version control, and a deployment dashboard bolted next to it. For a platform team, there is a simpler contract — bind each branch tier to exactly one environment, make every merge a Terraform apply, and route environment config fixes back down the ladder so nothing tested is ever lost. This is the model that delivered a university data platform of fifty-plus Lambda functions and twenty-plus Step Functions workflows. Four moves that make it work, the honest constraints, and where it stops scaling.

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8-Minute Read

PostGISPostgreSQLGiST IndexesH3Release ManagementAgentic AI

A field guide to geospatial lookup

Answering "which areas contain this point — and which points fall inside this area?" with plain PostgreSQL and PostGIS, fast enough to sit on the request path.

The moment polygons appear on a roadmap, most teams assume they need a specialty geospatial engine. In production, plain PostgreSQL with PostGIS answers point-in-polygon questions in milliseconds — if you respect how a spatial lookup executes, and if boundary data ships with the discipline of a software release: versioned, activated by a pointer flip, archived instead of deleted. Four moves that keep the hot path fast, three places the database will quietly betray you, and where AI pays off on top.

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8-Minute Read

Step FunctionsEventBridgeLambdaAirflowServerlessAgentic AI

A field guide to event-driven orchestration

Retiring the orchestration server — replacing Airflow and commercial schedulers with Step Functions, EventBridge, and Lambda that only exist while a pipeline is running.

Most data platforms carry an orchestration server whose only job is to start other work — and it is usually the least reliable, most patched, most babysat box in the stack. The alternative is not a better scheduler. It is no scheduler: pipelines that assemble themselves from events, run as state machines, and cost nothing between runs. We have retired the scheduler three times now — at a research university, inside Salesforce, and at Taco Bell — and the pattern holds. Four moves that make it work, and the honest costs to weigh before you commit.

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8-Minute Read

WorkdaySchema DriftApache IcebergSparkAWS GlueAgentic AI

A field guide to auto-relationalization

Turning nested API exports — Workday, PeopleSoft, Salesforce — into a proper relational model, without rebuilding it by hand every release.

Most data teams treat nested-to-relational as a design problem — someone draws the target schema, someone else writes the mapping code. It is actually an extraction problem. The relational model is already in the export, encoded in the path structure of the source itself, and the work is not designing it. The work is reading it. Four moves that make the extraction reliable, three details that make it survive schema drift, and where AI starts paying off on top.

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8-Minute Read

CI/CDGitRelease ManagementTrunk-Based DevAgentic AI

A field guide to selective promotion

How a large engineering team shares one development sandbox — and still ships any single feature to production, on any schedule.

Most release models quietly force a choice: integrate and test everything together and therefore ship it together, or ship features independently and never test them in the combination they will actually run in. There is a third option large engineering organizations eventually need — a shared sandbox for integrated testing plus selective per-feature promotion. Here is what makes it work, and the edge cases to design for deliberately.

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7-Minute Read

S3LambdaEMRApache IcebergBedrockAgentic AI

A field guide to the lean data lake

Assembling S3, Lambda, EMR, and Iceberg into a production-grade lake — and the four things you have to get right.

Many teams reach for a managed lakehouse because they assume the alternative is operationally too heavy. In our experience running production lakes at scale, the opposite is true. A small set of primitives, assembled with the right discipline, produces a leaner, cheaper, more debuggable lake than any managed platform — and it leaves every AI exit ramp wide open.

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A Note

These briefs are written for the engineers and architects doing the work. They are not white papers, sales materials, or vendor talks. If a brief is useful for whatever your team is wrestling with this quarter, take it — no form, no ask attached.

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