Extract. Transform. Read.A newsletter from Pipeline: Your Data Engineering Resource​Hi past, present or future data professional! I bet when you think of data engineering tools, you don’t think of smiley faces. But emojis, when used properly (and sparingly), can be a powerful way to emphasize logging messages and highlight infrastructure failures. Failing in data engineering can make you :sad_face:. Professionally, I’ve made every code mistake imaginable, with the highlight being omitting a column and needing to process a 45 TB table—twice! Even as I gain experience, I still make (but recover from) plenty of mistakes, which I document on a yearly basis. Since we’re a little more than halfway through the year, I’d encourage you to use this framework to honestly assess both your technical and interpersonal shortcomings as an aspiring data engineer. Proactively identifying areas of improvement is growth—and areas for improvement will pay more dividends than cramming in upskilling sessions. It might even make you :smiling_face: Here are this weeks un-embedded links:
P.S. – there’s a fun announcement coming in next week’s email. Thanks for ingesting, -Zach |
Reaching 20k+ readers on Medium and over 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.
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,...
Hi fellow data professional - Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! Since an email is probably one of the least exciting things to open on Christmas morning, I'll keep this brief. As a thank you for subscribing and reading the newsletter this year, I'd like to offer a gift: My FREE guide to web scraping in Python. Centered around 3 "real world" projects, the guide highlights the importance of being able to retrieve, interpret and ingest unstructured data. Get your guide here. Have a restful...
Hi fellow data professional! Once thought to be a purely back office role, data engineering is undergoing a radical transformation and gaining a new responsibility: Front-end deployment. The folks already deploying applications in this capacity are known, incidentally, as forward deployed software engineers or forward deployed engineers (FDEs). Before you worry about needing to learn JavaScript or other web programming paradigms, know that I’m referring to the preparation, deployment and...