Extract. Transform. Read.A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! If you haven’t heard "Happy New Year" enough in the past week… let me be, hopefully, the last to say it as we embrace all 2025 has to offer. Beginning a new year comes with the inevitable conception (and ultimately ignorance) of a new year’s resolution. Instead of focusing on one abstract goal to improve, I’d like to suggest, instead, that you form lasting habits, especially when it comes to your technical career. To ensure this advice is relevant to all who graciously read it, I’m splitting my suggested habits into three buckets:
Habits for Job Seekers
There are a lot of negative factors impacting job seekers right now but with the macro economy improving, there is hope for a smoother process in 2025. Habits for Entry-Level Employees
In 2024 I earned my first promotion, slowly hoisting myself up the corporate engineering ladder. Habits for Advancement
The last habit that I suggest you ingrain, regardless of position, is to never take shortcuts. Validating your data is going to take an extra day and delay a release? Not ideal, but neither is releasing a flawed product that would require extra time for debugging and redesign. And remember, when writing your date strings it’s now 2025-01. That’s a habit that will take some adjustment. Before you go: If you’re looking for an end-to-end project with real-world application in 2025, I’d suggest analyzing your personal finances. My first story of ‘25 covers a dashboard I built over the holiday break to track yearly and monthly credit card spending–with zero API connections. Visualizing 48 Months Of Credit Card Spending with PyPDF, SQL & Looker (Pt. I) Thanks for ingesting, -Zach Quinn |
Reaching 20k+ readers on Medium and nearly 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.
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...