The data substack scene has started fast and furious this year, with a bunch of great writers from last year upping their post frequency, without dropping the quality. My post this week will be shorter, but watch out for some interesting news in the next post. 🚀
I have recently been contributing to the open source data contracts project Buz.dev - Buz is written in Go.
As well as Buz being a very worthy project to contribute to, I enjoy writing code in Go. It’s also a way for me to try to contribute towards a solution for data contracts in practice, rather than simply writing about them from a hypothetical view point. I recently discovered that there was a London Gophers (yes, people who write Go are called Gophers) Meetup that happens once a month. It’s usually in and around the City of London, so I decided to attend.
The meetup was at Paddle.com’s London offices, near Old Street. I was hoping to find more contributors to Buz.
I’m a regular attendee at the London dbt and London Analytics Engineering Meetups, as well as hosting the London Data Quality Meetup (I know it’s been a while since I held one of these, but it might be time for a reimagining - watch this space).
In these meetups, though, I’m someone who is very familiar with the subject material and often delving into the nitty gritty detail with my questions. I was expecting that attending a software engineering meetup would be a different experience, where I would be an inexperienced newcomer, instead of an old hand.
It actually felt surprisingly similar. The hipster office vibes. The standard beer and pizza menu. Friendly, yet introverted, folks 😅. I got to speak to a couple of the Paddle backend engineers before the talks - we discussed Buz and their own internal project to achieve a similar end, specific to their architecture.
The talks were really good and actually really accessible for people new to software engineering. One compared cloud provider offerings - I could imagine a similar talk at a data meetup, but instead comparing data warehouses. There was also a talk on layoffs and how to respond, which reminded me of my post along this theme. It really showed me how similar some of the concerns are between data and analytics engineers and software engineers at the moment.
There was even a Go puzzle to solve during a mid-session break, and I got it right! 🦾
The final talk was also my favourite, by Dominic Black of Encore.dev (a project I’m also very interested in!) on forking Go to add tracing. I thought the talk would be inaccessible to me, as the topic sounded advanced, but it was really well-pitched and presented using live code examples. I really felt that novice Go engineers could understand it, if I could. If you can catch a recording of this, I highly recommend it!
My recommendation to data folks, based on my experience: go to SWE meetups if you can, as well as data ones. You can learn some new concepts and meet some great SWE folks. For you more experienced data folks, you may even find that you learn more from the SWE meetups than the data ones.