As we approach the end of the year, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on this first year of writing.
First of all, I wanted to thank you for subscribing to this newsletter.
Every week, I try to deliver as much value as possible on topics around data engineering and the modern data stack.
The supportive messages I've received all along this year have been immensely encouraging and have helped me a lot every week.
Learnings
I started from 0 in January and these are the lessons I've learned about the writing process so far:
shorter is better (ROI per world): max 1000 words/post
image > text: most readers scroll, check images, and then read the text if they are interested
practical > theoretical
inspiration never comes in front of a blank page. Topics need to be prepared before beginning to write.
Posts based on coding take a lot of time to prepare.
Collaborative posts are so much fun! Thanks again
and.Distribution takes as much time as writing does.
Top Articles
Here's a selection of 14 posts out of the 43 I've published this year, for those of you who might have joined after their publication.
Multi-engine data stacks:
Why do we need to mix compute engines together?
PoC: Multi-engine data stack - v0 🚀
Data Backend: Moving from BI to Data Apps: Part 1/2 + Part 2/2
Developer Experience
Lightweight Compute Engines
Pandas v2 - Polars - Pandas on GPU - DuckDB
DuckDB vs Snowflake
Orchestration
Data Contracts
AWS for Data Eng
Some statistics
44 posts / 52 weeks
0 → 541 subscribers
48% average open rate
As you can see below, things have accelerated a lot in the last 4 months.
Vision for 2024
I plan to keep on writing weekly in 2024 and sustain the growth of the last months.
I plan to experiment with new formats, including interviews and podcasts.
These will offer a deep dive into the data stacks of various companies to understand tech choices, successes, and errors.
Your feedback is invaluable to me.
Please don't hesitate to share (you can reply to this e-mail directly) what you liked or disliked in the newsletters, and suggest any topics you'd like to see covered in the future.
Thank you again for your support.
It means a lot to me.
I wish you a wonderful Christmas holiday.
See you in 2024!
-Ju