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Ghost Skills: Teaching AI Agents to Think Like Data Engineers

Another week, another skills repo on the GitHub trending page. I know. There are roughly seventeen of them now, all promising to turn your AI coding agent from a confident intern into a slightly-less-confident intern. Most of them are great. Most of them are also built by solo devs, for solo devs, on solo-dev codebases that fit comfortably in a context window. Which is fine, if that’s your world. Less fine if your world involves a Snowflake warehouse with four tables that could be the source of truth for “customer”, an SCD2 someone half-built in 2021 and quietly walked away from, and a dbt project where stg_users_final_v3_actually_use_this is, somehow, the one you’re meant to use. (Don’t laugh. You’ve seen worse.)

Sunday, June 14, 2026 Read
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The Duct Tape Data Engineer

The Engineer Who Ships I want to tell you about a data engineer I worked with. Let’s call her Sarah. Sarah had a reputation. When business stakeholders had an urgent question—the kind that arrives at 4 PM on a Friday with the CEO’s name in the subject line—they went to Sarah. Not to the senior architect with the impeccable data model. Not to the platform team with their carefully orchestrated Airflow DAGs. They went to Sarah.

Saturday, January 24, 2026 Read
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The Guerrilla Guide to Data Engineering Interviews

The Scenario That Changes Everything Picture this: You’re sitting in an interview room—or more likely these days, staring at a Zoom window with your carefully curated bookshelf background—and the interviewer asks you about data quality. “Tell me about your experience with data quality,” they say. You have two choices. Choice A: “Data quality is really important in data engineering. It involves ensuring data is accurate, complete, consistent, and timely. I believe strongly in implementing data quality checks throughout the pipeline.”

Sunday, January 11, 2026 Read
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Mastering Data Interviews: A Comprehensive Guide

Introduction After nearly two decades in the data engineering field, I’ve sat on both sides of the interview table countless times. Whether you’re a seasoned professional looking to change roles or a newcomer trying to break into the field, the interview process for data engineering positions can be both challenging and mysterious. There’s often uncertainty about what questions you’ll face, what skills you need to demonstrate, and what interviewers are really looking for beneath the surface.

Saturday, February 22, 2025 Read