Are You Coding Too Fast?


The Latest From Pipeline

Hi past, present or future data professional!

The opening scene of The Social Network, in which a fictionalized Mark Zuckerburg writes enough code to create a website in a single night, has forever skewed new engineers’ perceptions of development pace. If you think about it, media depictions of coding are almost always blisteringly fast and under duress. So, when you start coding in your first job, you might feel like me: Pressured to crank out as much code as quickly as you can.

In the process, however, you will inevitably make mistakes that range from minor infractions to potential career-enders. Just as importantly, you’ll face the very real issue of developer burnout.

One of the best things you can discover for yourself as a developer with less than 1-2 years of experience is your perfect development pace. If you’re new on the job and trying to find a pace comparable to your teammates you can use or create a burndown chart to compare your speed to that of your team and overall org.

However, despite your best efforts, you will encounter and need to overcome obstacles out of your control that can slow or even halt development pace. To learn how to set and stick to a reasonable pace and easily circumvent these issues, read the latest here.

How fast do you tend to code? Do you find yourself finishing tasks early or struggling to keep up?

Let me know: zach@pipelinetode.com

Thanks for ingesting,

-Zach Quinn

Extract. Transform. Read.

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.

Read more from Extract. Transform. Read.

Hi fellow data professional! It finally happened. I fell for a job scam. Luckily I realized my naivety after responding to the initial email. But let’s back up. We’ll examine Why this particular attempt was so “real” What made me skeptical How to prevent this from happening to you Established professionals in any field have the privileged problem of receiving unsolicited recruiter inquiries. If it’s from a random firm I typically move it to junk; if it’s a big name company, I give a look...

Hi fellow data professional! The best data skills to develop right now might just be cutting and measuring. While that statement might be a bit facetious, the hot media narrative is to push the idea of blue collar work as a viable fallback if you’re having trouble breaking into a conventional tech role. Outlets like CNN have touted the fact that data center engineer is the hottest role in tech. Executives, specifically Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, speculate that data center construction (despite...

Hi fellow data professional! This is the 100th week I’m reaching out into the void of the Internet to connect with you in order to democratize data engineering career knowledge. In the golden age of cable TV, shows would celebrate the 100th episode milestone by airing extended content like a 1-hour special for a sitcom that would typically consume 30 minutes. But I know your time is valuable so I’m going to do the opposite and make this a shorter newsletter than normal. Since I live what I...