Data engineering is the process of designing, building, and maintaining systems within a business that enable the deriving of meaningful insights from operational data.
#books5 entries
January 2, 2025
Data Engineering 101 (via)
This is a great book that appears to mirror much of the content from the Fundamentals of Data Engineering book by Joe Reis and Matt Housley. I'm finding it really satisfying this week digging more into the distinctions between data engineering, data science, data analysis, software engineering, and everything in between. I started out in very standard software development roles, building rails apps for various companies. My roles over the last few years have been decidedly not typical web development ones, but I'm never quite sure how exactly to explain what I do best. I feel like I'm finally on to something with all of this data engineering stuff.
September 2, 2020
The Life You Can Save
What are our ethical obligations to each other? It's a complicated question. Living in a civilised society implies abiding by a set of shared rules. Some are explicit like laws and contracts, some are implicit like cultural norms, and some are disputed. Whether we have an obligation to care for others, and if so to what extent, often ends up being debated as a political issue, but at its core it's a philosophical question. […10 min read]
December 10, 2019
Searching for Sunday
What is the point of going to church? I ask myself this question weekly. I didn't grow up going to any sort of regular religious services, but I'm becoming increasingly religious as an adult. I'm inclined to think that church should be a part of my faith journey, but mostly because going to church is just what religious people do. I've never understood the point, and have experienced quite a mixed bag of emotions venturing in and out of a handful of different faith communities over the past couple of years. […7 min read]
January 17, 2017
The Pragmatic Programmer
This is a book by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas about programming, but not in any particular language. It’s about all the other things that go along with programming, beyond just writing code. It’s a perfect book for beginners or people who don’t have a lot of experience working on a huge code base. You can learn pretty quickly how to write code that works, but writing code that is easy to read and maintain is whole other process. This book is a great place to start if you’re writing code that runs but is still sort of a mess. I feel like a lot of the advice would be common sense to someone with 5+ years of programming experience, but for beginners with a basic understanding of software development and coding this book is a perfect place to start learning how to think about the big picture. […5 min read]