Take a Look Around You…

If you work in data in 2021, the acronym ETL is everywhere.

Ask certain people what they do, and their whole response will be “ETL.” On LinkedIn, there are thousands of people with the title ETL Developer. It can be a noun, verb, adjective, and even a preposition. (Yes, a mouse can ETL a house.)

Standing for “Extract, Transform, and Load,” ETL refers to the general process of taking batches of data out of one database or application and loading it into another.

Data teams are the masters of ETL as they often have to stick their grubby fingers into…

You want to work with great code

Code that makes you grow. Code that motivates you to write great code. Code that demonstrates mastery of fundamental concepts. Code that reflects thoughtfulness and care by its creator. Code that inspires.

Code that blows the hair you have left, straight back.

But I don’t have time to write beautiful code…

Look, I get it. Projects have deadlines. Jira Tickets have point estimations. Getting something working in the quickest way possible is often a smart approach in a practical, corporate setting.

But if you find yourself always in that mindset, it’s a sign that you need to invest in yourself and grow. The lack of time you perceive for…

Learning why the Webster’s Director of Analytics doesn’t immediately fix problems, but takes the time to understand them first.

They say to not wait for a promotion.

Instead, to start assuming the responsibilities of the job you want.

Someone who embodied this advice is Luigi de Guzman, a common Data Analyst when I joined the data team at Vroom in 2017.

Uncommon was the fact that if you spoke to anyone who also worked there, they’d tell you he was one of the most integral and respected employees in the whole company.

How did he do this?

If I had to boil it down to one sentence, I’d say it was a relentless attention to detail to how business processes worked.

To learn more about his mindset…

Setting the Scene

Say you are an awesome developer sitting contentedly at your desk when a Slack message suddenly interrupts your peaceful mental flow:

It would appear there is a data issue with the new Activity History service released last month… Or at least a couple people think there is.

Now, instead of making progress on new tasks, you now need to drop those and look into what’s happening here.

Sigh.

Setting up the Problem

What this Activity History service does is calculate and then expose counts of how many times users have used the company’s application.

If we’re Netflix, it’s how many episodes a user’s watched…

If you’re like me, you might think it would be cool to generate a transcription of an online meeting now and then. Maybe you are conducting an interview or simply had a great conversation with a co-worker you’d like to reference again.

Whatever the case, there’s a zero percent chance that I’m paying for a premium Zoom account or coughing up multiple dollars per minute of to transcribe a meeting. Not when I’ve spent the last half-decade of my life learning how to use the AWS platform!

Please tell me there’s a better way?

There is.

The better way is…

No longer will anyone suffer while setting up the process of doing a full export of a DynamoDB table to S3.

The same cannot be said, however, for someone looking to import data into a Dynamo table. Particularly a large amount of data and fast.

The need for quick bulk imports can occur when records in a table get corrupted, and the easiest way to fix them is do a full table drop-and-recreate. Or when streaming data into a table, it can be useful to run a nightly batch “true-up” job to correct any intra-day anomalies that may have occurred.

…

The following scenario truthfully occurred in my career, and was the moment the queue’s purpose in a system “clicked” and became clear in my mind. I hope that sharing this problem, the resulting struggle, and how I eventually solved it has a similar effect on you.

Friday Afternoon

It’s a Friday afternoon at the office (remember those?) and you are getting ready for the weekend. You have already closed your laptop and are mingling with your co-workers to see where the happy hour spot is this week.

Suddenly, Brett from the marketing department approaches you — a respected senior engineer at the…

On the analytics team at Equinox Media, we invoke thousands of Lambda functions daily to perform a variety of data processing tasks. Examples range from the mundane shuffling of files around on S3, to the more stimulating generation of real-time fitness content recommendations on the Equinox+ app.

Because of our reliance on Lambda, it’s critical to diagnose issues as quickly as possible.

Here’s a diagram of the process we’ve set up to do so:

If you are also a user of Lambda, what does your error alerting look like? If you find yourself struggling to figure out why a failure…