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, authentic communication directly to your inbox.

After structuring my thoughts for my first ebook, I discovered I liked digging deeper into the topics that truly matter to you and I've worked diligently to be the resource I never had when beginning as a data engineer.

With that in mind, here is how I plan to further that mission in 2026, with a focus on making this content more widely accessible and actionable for you.

By Year's End: A New Home

• Consolidation: I am migrating my past blog posts to a single, universally accessible platform.
• Dismantling The Paywall: All the technical content I migrate from Medium will be moved out from behind the paywall. You shouldn’t have to pay a platform subscription just to read my technical deep dives.
• New Domain: I'll finally put to use the domain I've owned for 2 years: pipelinetode.com. This will be your permanent home for data engineering resources where you can actually search for relevant articles that won't be buried in platform clutter.

Building A Resource Library

Instead of doing what many creators in similar positions do and create a premium subscription, I'm focused on committing my energy to developing a robust library of both free and premium resources that solve your specific data engineering problems.

• Free Downloadable Guides: To balance my deeper paid work, I’m building a backlog of robust free guides which will include checklists, SQL optimization handbooks, and workflow templates to give you quick wins that can energize your job search or help you advance at work.
• Professional Ebooks: I’m doubling down on professionally informed guides to in-demand tech stacks like Python, SQL, and Airflow. I aim to offer a "slimmed down" and understandable version of denser textbooks that exist on the subject(s).
• Course(s): Recognizing not everyone learns best from "book learnin'", I plan to create a comprehensive course (or two!) that expands upon technical material in alignment with industry best practices.

My Promise to You

I want to reiterate that I was once exactly where you might be now: I attended grad school while working two jobs and improbably fought my way into a career as a data engineer. I’m not an academy or an ex-FAANG engineer cashing in on social capital. I’m just a guy who wants to provide value that significantly outweighs what you would spend on other educational resources.

You won't find $300 courses here, just high-utility tools to help you level up.

But to make sure I'm building the right thing, I'd love to know what your biggest learning headache going into 2026 is.

Happy 2026 and thanks for ingesting,

-Zach Quinn

​Medium | LinkedIn | Ebooks