I'm Alex, a backend and data engineer in Amsterdam. I build the parts of systems that move data from where it's made to where somebody needs it, and I try to make those parts boring.
This site is mostly short technical notes — things I got wrong and then understood — plus a few side projects that exist because something annoyed me.
Latest notes
- Backfilling a Kafka topic without double-counting
- A migration checklist for Postgres partitioning
- Why I stopped using Airflow sensors
Projects
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pgshift maintained
Diffs two Postgres schemas and writes the SQL to get from one to the other, in an order that survives foreign keys.
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topictail maintained
tail -ffor Kafka topics, with schema-registry decoding and a small filter language. The tool I reach for before reading any consumer code. -
canalwatch maintained
A Raspberry Pi logging the water level of the canal at the end of my street into a very small Postgres. Has taught me more about ingestion than any job.