Sep 29, 2023

Learning Apache Flink S01E01: Where Do I Start?

Like a fortunate child on Christmas Day, I’ve got a brand new toy! A brand new—to me—open-source technology to unwrap, learn, and perhaps even aspire to master elements of within.

I joined Decodable two weeks ago, and since Decodable is built on top of Apache Flink it seems like a great time to learn it. After six years learning Apache Kafka and hearing about this “Flink” thing but—for better or worse—never investigating it, I now have the perfect opportunity to do so.

Continue Reading

Jul 19, 2023

Blog Writing for Developers

Writing is one of the most powerful forms of communication, and it’s useful in a multitude of roles and contexts. As a blog-writing, documentation-authoring, twitter-shitposting DevEx engineer I spend a lot of my time writing. Recently, someone paid me a very nice compliment about a blog I’d written and asked how they could learn to write like me and what resources I’d recommend.

Never one to miss a chance to write and share something, here’s my response to this :)

Continue Reading

May 23, 2023

What Does This DevEx Engineer Do?

This was originally titled more broadly “What Does A DevEx Engineer Do”, but that made it into a far too tedious and long-winding etymological exploration of the discipline. Instead, I’m going to tell you what this particular instantiation of the entity does 😄

Continue Reading

May 3, 2023

Authoring Wordpress blogs in Markdown (with Google Docs for review)

Wordpress still, to an extent, rules the blogging world. Its longevity is testament to…something about it ;) However, it’s not my favourite platform in which to write a blog by a long way. It doesn’t support Markdown to the extent that I want. Yes, I’ve tried the plugins; no, they didn’t do what I needed.

I like to write all my content in a structured format - ideally Asciidoc, but I’ll settle for Markdown too. Here’s how I stayed [almost] sane whilst composing a blog in Markdown, reviewing it in Google Docs, and then publishing it in Wordpress in a non-lossy way.

Continue Reading

Dec 9, 2022

Looking Forwards, and Looking Backwards

As we enter December and 2022 draws to a close, so does a significant chapter in my working career—later this month I’ll be leaving Confluent and onto pastures new.

It’s nearly six years since I wrote a 'moving on' blog entry, and as well as sharing what I’ll be working on next (and why), I also want to reflect on how much I’ve benefited from my time at Confluent and particularly the people with whom I worked.

Continue Reading

Oct 24, 2022

Data Engineering in 2022: Wrangling the feedback data from Current 22 with dbt

I started my dbt journey by poking and pulling at the pre-built jaffle_shop demo running with DuckDB as its data store. Now I want to see if I can put it to use myself to wrangle the session feedback data that came in from Current 2022. I’ve analysed this already, but it struck me that a particular part of it would benefit from some tidying up - and be a good excuse to see what it’s like using dbt to do so.

Continue Reading

Oct 20, 2022

Data Engineering in 2022: Exploring dbt with DuckDB

I’ve been wanting to try out dbt for some time now, and a recent long-haul flight seemed like the obvious opportunity to do so. Except many of the tutorials with dbt that I found were based on using Cloud, and airplane WiFi is generally sucky or non-existant. Then I found the DuckDB-based demo of dbt, which seemed to fit the bill (🦆 geddit?!) perfectly, since DuckDB runs locally. In addition, DuckDB had appeared on my radar recently and I was keen to check it out.

Continue Reading

Oct 2, 2022

Data Engineering in 2022: Architectures & Terminology

This is one of those you had to be there moments. If you come into the world of data and analytics engineering today, ELT is just what it is and is pretty much universally understood. But if you’ve been around for …waves hands… longer than that, you might be confused by what people are calling ELT and ETL. Well, I was ✋.

Continue Reading

Sep 16, 2022

Data Engineering in 2022: Exploring LakeFS with Jupyter and PySpark

With my foray into the current world of data engineering I wanted to get my hands dirty with some of the tools and technologies I’d been reading about. The vehicle for this was trying to understand more about LakeFS, but along the way dabbling with PySpark and S3 (MinIO) too.

I’d forgotten how amazingly useful notebooks are. It’s six years since I wrote about them last (and the last time I tried my hand at PySpark). This blog is basically the notebook, with some more annotations.

Continue Reading

Sep 14, 2022

Data Engineering in 2022: Storage and Access

In this article I look at where we store our analytical data, how we organise it, and how we enable access to it. I’m considering here potentially large volumes of data for access throughout an organisation. I’m not looking at data stores that are used for specific purposes (caches, low-latency analytics, graph etc).

The article is part of a series in which I explore the world of data engineering in 2022 and how it has changed from when I started my career in data warehousing 20+ years ago. Read the introduction for more context and background.

Continue Reading