Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! When I worked as a resume consultant, the toughest mental block for clients was identifying and expressing material contributions at work; avoiding this communication is why so many job hunters revert to regurgitating their job duties rather than clarifying the outcomes of their work. In addition to overcoming the hurdle of distilling a complex technical role for non-technical recruiters to...
16 days ago • 2 min read
Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! Data science just cracked the top 40… of jobs whose main functions are most likely to be replaced by AI. If you’re up to speed on your AI doomerism news you’ll know that at the end of July, Microsoft released a list of jobs across disciplines and industries that could be majorly disrupted by AI. On a more positive economic outlook, data engineering is specifically cited as a growing role in the...
23 days ago • 2 min read
Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! Silicon Valley’s Gavin Belson once predicted a doomsday data scenario coined datageddon. The threat of datageddon wasn’t the volume of data, but, rather, the lack of repositories. Beginning a data engineering project, you might experience the opposite of datageddon, a scenario in which you know exactly how to store data but don’t know where to source it. The problem is, there’s no shortage of...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! Like me, if you’ve coded for any period of time, you’ll know the familiar dread of being stuck in “tutorial hell.” Now, to clarify, “tutorial hell” isn’t a label that comes because of a ”victim”’s suffering. Instead, it suggests the inability to escape a vicious cycle of similar tutorials when searching for an answer. While AI has improved many aspects of the day-to-day data profession, it has...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! My first programming experience wasn’t data science; it was a basic Intro to JavaScript course in, of all places, journalism school. As someone with no computer science knowledge and few technical skills (at the time) this short course introduced me to one of the most important realities of programming in any language: Encountering, overcoming and anticipating frustration. For beginners in data...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! It’s hardly controversial to say debugging is everyone’s least favorite part of programming. One widely-used debugging method is the rubber duck method, popularized in Pragmatic Programming, which suggests you talk through your code, aloud, to an inanimate object. Being able to speak intelligently about what prompted a technical decision is one of the most underrated data engineering skills. One...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! If you’re like me, in school you were always envious of your classmates that may not have applied themselves academically but were “good test takers.” Fortunately (for them at least), these folks would likely do well on what is quietly becoming the SAT of programming the GCA, or General Coding Assessment. Now, the General Coding Assessment isn’t any kind of board certifying test like the Bar...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! While many tech-oriented companies have (in one way or another) reneged on remote working arrangements, my employer made an extreme gesture to demonstrate its commitment to the ongoing office-less lifestyle: It removed an entire floor of our two-floor New Jersey office space. Other companies, like Spotify, have unveiled slogans like “Our employees aren’t children. Spotify will continue working...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! The only thing worse than summer temperatures (if you’re in the western hemisphere, that is) is a summer job search. Conventionally, summer isn’t the best time to apply for work; you could probably tell this if you’re currently working and find yourself accepting an overwhelming amount of OOO cal invites. If you are braving the heat of the job market, I want to share a more targeted and...
2 months ago • 1 min read