Life of a Data Engineer.....


Business user : Can we add a filter on this dashboard. This will help us track a critical metric.
me : sure this should be a quick one.

Next day :

I quickly opened the dashboard to find the column in the existing dashboard's data sources.  -- column not found

Spent a couple of hours to identify the data source and how to bring the column into the existence data pipeline which feeds the dashboard( table granularity , join condition etc..).

Then comes the pipeline changes , data model changes , dashboard changes , validation/testing.

Finally deploying to production and a simple email to the user that the filter has been added.

A small change in the front end but a lot of work in the backend to bring that column to life.

Never underestimate data engineers and data pipelines 💪