Hello there!

You might have stumbled across this page or had it forwarded to you. Welcome to my writing on data platforms and tooling.

This entry is about what I think you, the reader, can expect from these articles. If what I describe sounds interesting, you can subscribe to receive notifications for new articles. You can also send me feedback, questions, and general notes by responding to any E-Mail from me containing an article; I’d love for this to be a bidirectional experience!

What can you expect?

In my data career I’ve had three roles: research assistant, data scientist, and most recently data engineer. As a data scientist and researcher, I was primarily a user of data tooling. I used them to do exploratory and inferential analysis; run experiments and interpret results; design, develop and deprecate data models; make visualizations; and so on. Nowadays, my job is building the platforms and tools that enable others to do this work.

Working with data, especially at scale, comes with many interesting technical challenges. For me, technical challenges are even more engaging when contextualized by the use cases that motivate them. My goal is to collect my thoughts on these use cases and challenges, compile them into what I hope is enjoyable reading, and share that with you here!

Let’s go!

This series will be my first foray into fixed-schedule writing, and I’m excited about it! I intend to keep this writing dynamic, creative and curious, so don’t be surprised by experiments (not just the statistical kind). You can also expect follow-up posts when my thoughts on a topic inevitably change. I will draw on my personal experience and opinions for the most part, but there will also certainly be references to other sources including newsletters, books, open source repositories, blog posts, and likely the occasional tweet.

My target is two articles per-month so if you’ve subscribed and haven’t heard from me in a while, check my Substack archive and your E-Mail folders.

’til next time

— Alex