Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! As difficult as data engineering can be, 95% of the time there is a structure to data that originates from external streams, APIs and vendor file deliveries. Useful context is provided via documentation and stakeholder requirements. And specific libraries and SDKs exist to help speed up the pipeline build process. But what about the other 5% of the time when requirements might be structured, but...
10 days ago • 1 min read
Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! To clarify the focus of this edition of the newsletter, the reason you shouldn’t bother learning certain data engineering skills is due to one of two scenarios— You won’t need them You’ll learn them on the job You won’t need them Generally these are peripheral skills that you *technically* need but will hardly ever use. One of the most obvious skills, for most data engineering teams, is any...
17 days ago • 2 min read
Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! One of the dirty secrets about my job is how easy it can be to fix broken pipelines. Often I’m retriggering a failed DAG task or, if using a code-less pipeline, literally hitting refresh. In fact, “refresh” is a great example for one of the more abstract data engineering concepts: State. And, specifically the maintenance of state under any condition. This is the definition of an important...
24 days ago • 1 min read
Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! Software engineers can package anything— including buzzwords. “Learn new, industry-relevant skills” was compressed to “upskilling.” And while I’m a proponent of continuous learning, especially when it helps you avoid stagnation, at the end of the day, upskilling is a lot of work. Without proper structure and no mandate from a school or employer, it’s difficult to remain engaged, no matter how...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! Winter in the western hemisphere is grim. Even in sunny Florida, where I write from, we’ve experienced weeks of gray skies and plunging temperatures. In the corporate world, winter (Q1) presents another grim reality: Layoffs. Unfortunately, no position, no matter how “critical to the organization” is layoff-proof. Even your CEO can be let go; hence, the “golden parachute” many executives build...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! For data engineering, a profession built on principles of automation, it can be counterintuitive to suggest that any optimizations or “shortcuts” could be negative. But, as someone who was once a “baby engineer”, I can tell you that a combination of temptation and overconfidence will inevitably drive you to say “I could do without x development step.” Doing so increases reputational risk (loss...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! A peer of mine once revealed the reason they were sleep deprived: They were up past midnight writing ad hoc SQL queries with a c-suite leader literally hovering over their shoulder. The visibility of data analysts (like the one in the anecdote) and data scientists’ products, dashboards and ML models, means they are often the first on a Business Intelligence team to be bothered when something...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline. *Today's edition was initially published on Medium on 12/10/24 Hi past, present or future data professional! I’ve recently been honing a data engineering skill that might not occur to you—drawing. When I first started my data engineering job 3+ years ago, any description or information related to my code would be in written form. This meant everything from README documentation to illegible legal pad scribbles would be all I had to inform...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
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...
2 months ago • 2 min read