Hi past, present or future data professional!

If you’re in the U.S., Happy Thanksgiving! I’m prepping for my food coma, so I’ll make this week’s newsletter quick.

Like millions of Americans, I’ll be watching NFL football (go Ravens!).

The average NFL game is 3 hours. If you can skip just one of today’s games and carve out that time for professional development, here’s how I’d spend it.

In the spirit of football, I’ll split the time designation into 4 quarters.

1. Documentation pass - if you read and program regularly, I have no doubt you are amassing some great code in your GitHub. But given the time drain on programming, I’d be willing to bet your repository is either undocumented or under-documented. Take 30-45 minutes to write a Markdown file that includes a quick blurb about your project, rationale for your tech stack and, at the very least, a directory tree.
2. Refactor - just like every writer begins with a rough draft, very few programmers generate perfect code on the first attempt. As AI coding abilities develop at a rapid pace, your competitive advantage is creating code that is legible, logical and follows best practices.
3. Diagram - if you want to be a data engineer, system design is an essential skill to develop. Practice it by creating a diagram for a school or professional project that clearly illustrates inputs, downstream dependencies and other relationships.
4. Read a case study - Too many new engineers worry about coding and not solving business problems. For thorough, applicable case studies of real-life companies, I recommend Vu Trinh’s Medium posts. Or if you want something denser, seek out Google’s Dremel paper, the blueprint for BigQuery.

Have a pleasant holiday and thanks for ingesting,

-Zach Quinn

P.S. look out for a quick Black Friday note from me tomorrow.

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