Getting More Generalists in Data Engineers and Data Scientists

Summary

Applications of data have grown well beyond the venerable business intelligence dashboards that organizations have relied on for decades. Now it is being used to power consumer facing services, influence organizational behaviors, and build sophisticated machine learning systems. Given this increased level of importance it has become necessary for everyone in the business to treat data as a product in the same way that software applications have driven the early 2000s. In this episode Brian McMillan shares his work on the book "Building Data Products" and how he is working to educate business users and data professionals about the combination of technical, economical, and business considerations that need to be blended for these projects to succeed.

Announcements

• Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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• Today’s episode is Sponsored by Prophecy.io – the low-code data engineering platform for the cloud. Prophecy provides an easy-to-use visual interface to design & deploy data pipelines on Apache Spark & Apache Airflow. Now all the data users can use software engineering best practices – git, tests and continuous deployment with a simple to use visual designer. How does it work? – You visually design the pipelines, and Prophecy generates clean Spark code with tests on git; then you visually schedule these pipelines on Airflow. You can observe your pipelines with built in metadata search and column level lineage. Finally, if you have existing workflows in AbInitio, Informatica or other ETL formats that you want to move to the cloud, you can import them automatically into Prophecy making them run productively on Spark. Create your free account today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/prophecy.
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• Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Brian McMillan about building data products and his book to introduce the work of data analysts and engineers to non-programmers

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• Can you describe what motivated you to write a book about the work of building data products?
  • Who is your target audience?
  • What are the main goals that you are trying to achieve through the book?
• What was your approach for determining the structure and contents of the book?
• What are the core principles of data engineering that have remained from the original wave of ETL tools and rigid data warehouses?
  • What are some of the new foundational elements of data products that need to be codified for the next generation of organizations and data professionals?
• There is a lot of activity and conversation happening in and around data which can make it difficult to understand which parts are signal and which are noise. What, if anything, do you see as being truly new and/or innovative?
  • Are there any core lessons or principles that you consider to be at risk of getting drowned out in the current frenzy of activity?
• How do the practices for building products with small teams differ from those employed by larger groups?
  • What do you see as the threshold beyond which a team can no longer be considered "small"?
• What are the roles/skills/titles that you view as necessary for building data products in the current phase of maturity for the ecosystem?
• What do you see as the biggest risks to engineering and data teams?
• What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen the principles in the book used?
• What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on the book?

Contact Info

• Email
• twitter
• LinkedIn

Parting Question

• From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Closing Announcements

• Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, Podcast.__init__ to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used.
• Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes.
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Links

• Building Data Products: Introduction to Data and Analytics Engineering for non-programmers
• Theory of Constraints
• Throughput Economics
• "Swaptronics" – The act of swapping out electronic components until you find a combination that works.
• Informatica
• SSIS – Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services
• 3X – Kent Beck
• Wardley Maps
• Vega Lite
• Datasette
• Why Use Make – Mike Bostock
• Building Production Applications Using Go & SQLite

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA