Bio

Hey 👋

I’m Andrew, a Principal Engineer at GoCardless, largely focussed on Data and related areas.

I’m passionate about driving data-driven organisations who get the most value from their data.

The first half of my career was as a software developer. From 2012 I’ve been more focussed on data engineering and building data platforms.

I joined GoCardless in 2017 as their first data engineer, tasked with building a data platform from scratch.

This was a great opportunity! The team and I followed basically the reference architecture of the time, starting with implementing a change data capture (CDC) service to bring all the data in to a centralised data warehouse, where it could be used by consumers.

However, we started noticing the same problems that everyone else in data seemed to be having. The data was unreliable. It took vast amounts of effort and money to transform it into something of use. There was a disconnect between consumers and generators, who had no idea what the others were doing with this data.

The data was of poor quality, with no expectations set on its usability or reliability.

I started thinking “there must be a better way!”. Why can’t we have a well defined interface for data, like we do in other places, such as APIs? How can we bring data generators and consumers closer together, so they have a shared sense of ownership over the positive business value we can generate with data? What does the tooling look like that would facilitate this culture change?

This led to me inventing Data Contracts - a new architecture pattern that drives the culture change needed to becoming a truly data driven organisation.

We started rolling this out in 2021, and I wrote a little blog post on it. That got noticed, and before I knew it I was on podcasts, interviews, and presenting at conferences about the hottest trend in data engineering since data mesh!

We’re still on our data journey at GoCardless, and I continue to write and speak about what we’re learning in the hope of helping others finally achieve that return on investment in data that we’ve been promising for decades.

Outside of work I’m kept busy by my young family and - when I do have free time! - enjoy doing 🏃, learning 📚, and brewing 🍺.

Feel free to contact me if you’d like to chat about data in general, data contracts specifically, or brewing beer! You can find me LinkedIn or at [email protected].

Cover image from Unsplash.