Paul Hudson
Founder, Skippr
I build data infrastructure, design cloud Infra, deploy agent systems, and architect data platforms. A few themes recur across projects: recovery and consistency as a starting point, reactive data flows, and a small operational surface. KISS. The problems vary — the structural instincts are very reliable.
Approach
I tend to start with how a system recovers. I'm recently particularly interested in deterministic simulation testing. I've always had a preference for determinism, immutability, and idempotency — simple systems tend to be faster, more reliable systems.
I'm drawn to reactive systems — architectures where state changes propagate outward and consumers converge without coordination. My nature is to accept the chaos, be resilient to it, rather than pretend we can boil the ocean. This shows up in my work as event streams, ingestion-time schema inference and evolution, idempotent applies, all-or-nothing commit models — allow failure, always fail closed. And wherever possible: autotune, fewer knobs and moving parts, less to operate. Less human failure, less cognitive overhead, simple to reason about. We must be free to dream and build more.