I’ve dedicated 2024 to be the year of learning and investing in my growth. While this is important to do every year, sometimes we put this to the back burner and instead focus on progressing in our careers, or maybe our businesses.
Unfortunately, many people don’t realize how important learning new things is to grow in their careers—especially a career in data. It is easy to fall behind in your knowledge, as the space constantly changes.
Analytics engineers need to carve out proper time each week to ensure they expand their knowledge on different elements of the data stack, key fundamentals of analytics engineering, and all the new tools on the market.
Use this list as a guide on what to focus on as an analytics engineer. Choose a different one of these topics to study each week or month, and watch your success in your role skyrocket.
Data contracts have been all of the rage for the last few years, and there’s a good reason why. It’s a problem that has existed between analytics engineers and software engineers forever!
Many of us have simply accepted it as the norm, rather than trying to change it, hence why it’s taken so long for any progress to be made.
If you aren’t familiar with data contracts, these are the agreements and expectations set between data producers and data consumers on what the data will look like.
It’s common for data producers to change a data type or field name without letting the downstream consumer (in our case, analytics engineers) know. Then, because one of our data models depends on the changed field, something downstream breaks.
The data team is then forced to go into fire-fighting mode, changing that field in the staging layer of its data models, ensuring its dependencies downstream can use this modified field.
While one field may not seem like a big deal, if changes are constantly being made by producers without…