The Latest From Pipeline: Your Data Engineering ResourceHi past, present or future data professional! One of the worst habits you can adapt in data engineering is to accept a tool or technology as a black box you’ll simply never understand. For me, for the longest time, this was virtual machines. I would commit and troubleshoot code that would run within a VM but never quite knew how to interact with it. Recently, I provisioned a Google Cloud Compute Engine instance for a junior teammate and learned how to simply and logically create a virtual environment that can boost compute power and accurately mimic production. The best part is, I’ve distilled this into a process that shouldn’t take you more than 5 minutes. Read the latest here. And if you want to learn why automation isn’t always the end goal of software engineering, read last week’s article. Thanks for ingesting, -Zach |
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Hi fellow data professional! This edition almost became an apology because I’ve been on a tight deadline and pre-baby morning wake up thinking/writing time has become GSD (get sh!t done) hour. Long story short: I got brought in late to a time-sensitive project that required me to speed through a planned pipeline migration. As a recovering news junkie (aka journalist), I used to live and die by deadlines. But, given the unpredictability of data-oriented work and internal deliverables, it’s...
Hi fellow data professional! For years, the opening of The Simpsons, specifically Bart writing lines on the chalkboard, has been incredibly relatable to me. Not because I’m up to mischief (none I’ll admit to here, anyway), but because I spend most days writing the same three lines of SQL over and over again. If you've ever been paranoid about a table's content, you might know what I'm talking about. It’s the aggregate COUNT(*) grouped by a date field, ordered by date DESC. The output of that...
Hi fellow data professional! In a previous newsletter, I mentioned an idea that I wanted to explore deeper. At the risk of double-quoting a la The Office’s Michael Scott quoting Wayne Gretzky (“You Miss 100% Of The Shots You Don’t Take - Waynze Gretzky - Michael Scott”), here is the idea. “To be marketable as a candidate, you don’t just want to show how you can go from A to B (requirements->pipeline). You need to go from A to C (requirements->pipeline->scale/support).” You might be asking...