Daily data contracts tips

Following on from yesterdays note, another almost surprisingly simple way to stand out at work and further your career is to be dependable.

My first promotion, from a graduate level to just above, was completely unexpected. I wasn’t asking for it, nor deliberately working towards it. It just happened.

Welcome to day one of my series of short, actionable tips for your career! And before I really get starting sharing some ideas and advice, I thought I would start with a note on work/life balance.

Your contracts-backed data platform should give your users a production ready way to generate, manage and consume data, and make that data available through a reliable interface.

3 common data assumptions I believe are worth challenging:

1. No one else cares about data quality
2. You have to bring all data centrally before you can work on it
3. Your problems are unique to you, and therefore you need a unique solution

Earlier this week I was on a panel organised by Data Council and Soda titled “Data Contracts: The Next Frontier”. The recording is now available on YouTube.

What does your exec team think about data?

Do they feel like they are using data to drive decisions?

Mostly when I talk about data contracts I’m talking about applying them to data generated within our organisations. That’s usually the most valuable data we have. It’s also the data we have most control over its generation.

APIs and data contracts have a lot in common, and APIs were part of the inspiration behind data contracts when I was coming up with the idea a few years back. The both provide the interface (see my post from a couple of weeks ago on the importance of interfaces), they both set expectations for the user (the structure, semantics, SLOs, and so on), and they both allow for integrations with other services, tools, etc.

In yesterday’s note I wrote about the problem with defaults. One response to my personal data example could be “why don’t we just infer it?”.