Extract. Transform. Read.A newsletter from Pipeline. Hi past, present or future data professional! This holiday season will be a little less bright thanks to my lack of personal GitHub commits. Like you, I began 2024 full of ideas and motivation that, let’s be honest, was depleted by the end of Q1 when I was cranking out enough code at work that would please even notorious code volume stickler Elon Musk. Despite my lacking output, I managed to hunker down to create useful “bespoke” (a.k.a. self-created) data tools to save hours on tedious work. Even if you don’t take inspiration from the code or create similar code, my hope is that you’ll come away with 1 takeaway: Coding for function == coding for fun. As a beginner it might make sense to spend hours processing available datasets to refine coding techniques and get comfortable with data manipulation; however, as you gain experience you’ll realize that some hobby projects can hit the trifecta of programming satisfaction.
You might not think “fun” when you think of parsing Walmart receipts to reign in grocery spending, but that’s what I spent 1-2 hours coding up once I realized my Walmart Plus usage was getting a bit “spendy.” The added bonus is that the parser can be leveraged to either calculate groceries or, in a much more relevant application, help me determine what items were missing from my order (the double-edged sword of passive shopping); read more. Once I discovered and gained experience with PDF parser PyPDF, I began to see a variety of applications, including the parsing and ingestion of 6-8 page credit card statements. Since financial data is notoriously difficult to obtain, being able to cleanly and reliably process credit card statements provides transparency for my spending habits. In an earlier edition of this newsletter I mentioned iterative backfilling as one of my top recommendations for small-scale automation; I literally spent 4 hours at work running a script that functions nearly identically to what I outline here. As a bonus, I didn’t even have to be in the room. Although Python served me well for projects this year, I’ve developed an appreciation for Google Sheets’ data connections. Instead of having to update a static sheet of sources I reference in my published work and in these notes to you, I created a very niche search engine using only a Sheets connection and a bit of SQL. If you’re even an occasional BigQuery user, check it out. While I’ve enjoyed coding these backend builds, in 2025 I’d like to venture out of my comfort zone and create simple UIs for builds I access repeatedly or would like to share in a neater format. If you’d like to read the expanded, published version of this newsletter, you can do so here. Thanks for ingesting, -Zach Quinn |
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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...
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...
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...