Extract. Transform. Read.A newsletter from Pipeline: Your Data Engineering ResourceHi past, present or future data professional! Few aspects of data engineering are as shame-inducing as saying, after a failed deployment, “But it ran in my environment!” In my first year as a data engineer I was that guy who made excuses like this and grew frustrated that I would complete a build and then struggle to push it over the finish line. Here’s what helped me:
I don’t track my deployment success rate (probably for the best given my initial failures), but I estimate that following the above advice has reduced my failure rate from 20% to between 1-5%. None of these bullets, however, is a substitute for hands-on experience. To step through your own deployment, enroll in my free 5-day Deploy Your First Cloud Function course. As always, please send me any questions: zach@pipelinetode.com. Thanks for ingesting, -Zach |
Reaching 20k+ readers on Medium and over 3k learners by email, I draw on my 4 years of experience as a Senior Data Engineer to demystify data science, cloud and programming concepts while sharing job hunt strategies so you can land and excel in data-driven roles. Subscribe for 500 words of actionable advice every Thursday.
Hi fellow data professional! For years, the opening of The Simpsons, specifically Bart writing lines on the chalkboard, has been incredibly relatable to me. Not because I’m up to mischief (none I’ll admit to here, anyway), but because I spend most days writing the same three lines of SQL over and over again. If you've ever been paranoid about a table's content, you might know what I'm talking about. It’s the aggregate COUNT(*) grouped by a date field, ordered by date DESC. The output of that...
Hi fellow data professional! In a previous newsletter, I mentioned an idea that I wanted to explore deeper. At the risk of double-quoting a la The Office’s Michael Scott quoting Wayne Gretzky (“You Miss 100% Of The Shots You Don’t Take - Waynze Gretzky - Michael Scott”), here is the idea. “To be marketable as a candidate, you don’t just want to show how you can go from A to B (requirements->pipeline). You need to go from A to C (requirements->pipeline->scale/support).” You might be asking...
Hi fellow data professional! Remember when the world ended? This month, 6 years ago, the world shut down and entered “unprecedented times.” Shortly after COVID-19 was designated a pandemic, I was unceremoniously furloughed from my day job at Disney World for 3-ish months. During COVID while others quarantined, I was on the move. After quickly feeling isolated in our third floor Central Florida apartment, my now-wife and I joined millions of other American 20-somethings who took a pandemic as...