Ownership over Blame Accountability creates progress. Blame creates fear. I remember the morning by the silence. Not the peaceful kind—the brittle kind. The kind where dashboards stop updating, batch logs stop ticking, and no one wants to be the first to ask what’s wrong. I refreshed our monitoring tool three times. Then a fourth. The overnight load hadn’t landed. The tables were stale. And I knew before opening Slack that something upstream had buckled. ...
Empathy over Ego Code is read more than written. Be human. Five years ago, I wrote a data parser that still runs today. It handled edge cases nobody warned us about. Took flat files from a vendor who’d never heard of schemas. Normalized everything into tidy rows for the warehouse. At the time, I was proud of how concise it was. It had no third-party dependencies. It used clever recursion, tight loops, and a few expressions I knew would confuse anyone who hadn’t been knee-deep in it for months. ...
I don’t remember the first time someone called it “the magic mart,” but by the time I joined the team, the name had stuck. It was our crown jewel—a data mart built ten years ago, blessed and burdened by legacy wisdom, and surrounded by a reverent fog of mystery. No one could tell you exactly how it worked. But it worked. Mostly. And that, apparently, was enough. “Don’t touch the mart,” they’d say. “It’s been blessed.” ...
Clarity over Cleverness If it’s hard to read, it’s hard to trust. The first time I broke a healthcare system, it was with a single line of code. It was 2004. I was working under the U.S. Army Medical Command, part of a small but scrappy development team supporting military hospitals. We used Oracle—10g at the time, powerful but brittle—and I had written what I considered a masterpiece: a stored procedure that consolidated nurse staffing, patient census, and acuity levels into a real-time dashboard. The logic was dense but efficient, dynamically generating views based on parameters and metadata stored in a config table. ...
Reliability over Performance Unreliable code scales mistakes. Reliability scales value. The dashboards looked great. Clean, fast, exactly what leadership asked for. And somewhere beneath that polished surface, a silent flaw was already scaling. It happened in the middle of a high-stakes transformation—an enterprise data platform rebuild with global visibility. The goal was ambitious: consolidate systems, modernize reporting, and get critical metrics into the hands of leaders faster than ever before. ...