While “software is [still actively] eating the world”, it’s also clear that open source is taking over software. Simply put, open source is a superior approach at building and distributing software because it provides important guaranties around how software can be discovered, tried, operated, collaborated on and packaged. …

Batch data processing — historically known as ETL — is extremely challenging. It’s time-consuming, brittle, and often unrewarding. Not only that, it’s hard to operate, evolve, and troubleshoot. In this post, we’ll explore how applying the functional programming paradigm to data engineering can bring a lot of clarity to the…

This post follows up on The Rise of the Data Engineer, a recent post that was an attempt at defining data engineering and described how this new role relates to historical and modern roles in the data space. In this post, I want to expose the challenges and risks that…

With a brief Introduction and Takeaway added by Taylor D. Edmiston Introduction Every once in a while I read a post about the future of tech that resonates with clarity. A few weeks ago it was The Rise of the Data Engineer by Maxime Beauchemin, a data engineer at Airbnb and…

I joined Facebook in 2011 as a business intelligence engineer. By the time I left in 2013, I was a data engineer. I wasn’t promoted or assigned to this new role. Instead, Facebook came to realize that the work we were doing transcended classic business intelligence. The role we’d created…