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.
Are You Coding Too Fast?
The Latest From PipelineHi 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.
Hi fellow data professional! Once thought to be a purely back office role, data engineering is undergoing a radical transformation and gaining a new responsibility: Front-end deployment. The folks already deploying applications in this capacity are known, incidentally, as forward deployed software engineers or forward deployed engineers (FDEs). Before you worry about needing to learn JavaScript or other web programming paradigms, know that I’m referring to the preparation, deployment and...
Hi past, present or future data professional! As time in 2025 dwindles, I wanted to share what I learned about optimizing design, development and troubleshooting time while working 3 days per week this fall. Quick background: If you’ve been a long-time reader, you’ll know that in March my wife and I had our first child. Consequently, through my employer, I was eligible for several months of parental leave. Anticipating my wife’s return to work (after much needed time off!) I allocated the...
Hi past, present or future data professional! As the winter holidays approach, we’re entering a period of downtime for most orgs. Assuming your employer has hit goals (or accepted losses), allocated coverage for the slew of inevitable vacation requests and maybe even entered a “code freeze”, you’re entering data & tech’s slow season. If you’re working, during this time you may be asked to do any number of “downtime” (actual free time, not data outages) tasks ranging from code refactors to...