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What is a “Good” Data or Software Engineer?

Recently, for some unknown reason, I was pursuing the new Stackoverflow … called Reddit, for Data Engineering … and I ran across an interesting question … more or less it was related to “what makes a good Software Engineer … in a Data Engineering context.”

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How to Solve Data Engineering Problems

One thing I find myself doing these days (I am unsure how I feel about this), is teaching others to solve problems … Data Engineering problems to be specific. It’s not a hard stretch for most to imagine that what a person does at Senior+ software-type levels is just write good code all day. I […]

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CI/CD for Data Engineers.

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PyArrow vs Polars (vs DuckDB) for Data Pipelines.

I’ve had something rattling around in the old noggin for a while; it’s just another strange idea that I can’t quite shake out. We all keep hearing about Arrow this and Arrow that … seems every new tool built today for Data Engineering seems to be at least partly based on Arrow’s in-memory format. So, […]

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The Abstractions Are Making You Dumb (rise of the Shallow Expert)

When I was young and full of myself, writing Perl and PHP, while your ma was still reading you a bedtime story and giving you a stuffy to fall asleep with, I had to program uphill, both ways, in the rain and snow. Not like you milk toast Data Engineers clickty clicking around Databricks and […]

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What I’ve Learned After A Decade Of Data Engineering

After 10 years of Data Engineering work, I think it’s time to hang up the proverbial hat and ride off into the sunset, never to be seen again. I wish. Everything has changed in 10 years, yet nothing has changed in 10 years, how is that even possible? Sometimes I wonder if I’ve learned anything […]

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Building Open-Source Python Packages – SparklePop

One of the things I love about Python is its flexibility and huge community, a community that puts out a never-ending stream of useful packages for the average Software Engineer. In a show of solidarity to the open-source community, I thought I would publish a PYPI package that will probably be used by 5 people […]

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Databricks Buys Tabular – 1 Billion Dollar Deal. Iceberg vs Delta Lake?

The battle for the Data Warehouse, Data Lake, Lake House, or whatever you want to call it, in the age of AI just got more interesting. In an unsurprising move, Databricks has announced plans to buy Tabular for 1 billion dollars, beating out Snowflake who was reportedly trying to do the same thing.

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