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:

• Job Seeker
• Entry-level
• Advancement

Habits for Job Seekers

• Put more energy into generating connections than applications; in an increasingly tight market, it’s truly about who you know… with a lot of devs hurting due to market factors, you might find folks more receptive to outreach than previous years
• Find ways to automate tedious work like cover letter writing; you can invest excess time in interview prep
• Follow up but don’t be annoying; many HR teams are stretched thin and processes can take longer than expected
• Make sure any projects you complete/present have a business application

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

• Find yourself with down time? Audit your repositories to learn and maybe even improve existing code​
• Survive and thrive in meetings by taking a small notebook to jot down assignment details and business context
• Work toward consistency not mastery; you don’t need the most “cutting edge” solution for every task. Get the work done to be a team asset

In 2024 I earned my first promotion, slowly hoisting myself up the corporate engineering ladder.

Habits for Advancement

• Have nothing to do? Create documentation; demonstrating you can think through, articulate and design data solutions shows you’re ready for more responsibility
• Seek opportunities for ownership; you don’t have to be explicitly assigned to become an SME (subject matter expert) on a particular product
• Give and take productive feedback; it’s tempting to want to tear up code and offer the harsh criticism you may have received while a newbie dev. You can be precise and empathetic, qualities leaders look for when considering who to promote to senior positions

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