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! Quick question: How much could I pay you to switch your job? Conventional wisdom in the tech industry in the last handful of years is that the way to supercharge growth and max out your career earnings is to frequently change jobs. On average, job switchers could and should target an increase of 15-20% of their current salary. But in a rocky economy (at least here in the U.S.), career experts are urging would-be switchers to consider the benefits of a stable role...
Hi fellow data professional and Happy New Year! In the second half of 2025, I made a radical choice: I (largely) stopped blogging. Over the past year, Medium (where I host my content) made a series of changes that de-prioritizes technical content, leading to the departure of several major publications, including Toward Data Science. Pair that platform disillusionment with a bit of burnout, and the result is a feeling that it’s time for a change. For 75+ weeks, I’ve preferred concise,...
Hi fellow data professional - Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! Since an email is probably one of the least exciting things to open on Christmas morning, I'll keep this brief. As a thank you for subscribing and reading the newsletter this year, I'd like to offer a gift: My FREE guide to web scraping in Python. Centered around 3 "real world" projects, the guide highlights the importance of being able to retrieve, interpret and ingest unstructured data. Get your guide here. Have a restful...