Hey

I hope your November wasn’t as chaotic as mine. Black Friday hit and suddenly my inbox looked like someone ran INSERT INTO subscribers in a loop.

Every refresh meant new people joining, introducing themselves, sharing why they’re here. It felt a little unreal.

And it made me sit back and think about why this place is growing so fast. A lot of data engineers are tired of being the only one who cares about reliability, tired of all the meetings, tired of doing senior work without being seen as senior.

I get it. I’ve been there. And it feels good to see so many people finding each other here.

If you’re not inside yet, the promo is still open for a bit longer:

https://datagibberish.com/subscribe

Why I paused the live coaching calls

I want to be honest about a change I made last month.

The monthly group coaching calls weren’t working. Not because people didn’t care, but because data professionals already drown in meetings.

No one wants another Zoom square at the end of a long day. And I don’t want to build things people feel guilty for missing.

So I paused them. It felt like the right move for where everyone is in their life and workload.

What’s replacing them (and why I’m excited)

A few amazing community members agreed to do something very different:

Spotlight Sessions.

These are live interviews with paid subscribers where we dig into their story, their growth, their mistakes, their wins, the messy, human side of becoming good at this job. These folks are thoughtful and experienced, and I’m genuinely excited to share their thinking with you.

The best part? You don’t have to join live.

The recordings will always be there, waiting for you when you have time.

And if you want to join, reach out. I'd love to know you and organise something with you.

If you missed some of the content this month

This month was productive as hell.

We kicked things off with Own It, the track where I finally gave you the exact blueprint I use to prove senior-level impact without bragging, begging, or waiting for someone to “notice.” Scope. SLOs. Alerts. RBAC. Retention. Evidence. It’s the stuff every experienced data engineer ends up learning the hard way. If you missed it, it’s worth a slow read.

» Take the mini-course

Then we got into high-stakes meetings. The ones you walk into with hope and walk out of with confusion. Not because people are dumb, but because no one structures the damn conversation. And how that chaos keeps data engineers stuck at the edge of decisions instead of inside them. If you’ve ever left a meeting thinking “did we even decide anything?” this one will hit you in the ribs.

» High stakes, low structure

Right after that came the Stakeholder Alignment Playbook, which is basically the strategy I use so I don’t get blindsided by rejections two months into a project. No mystique. No politics. Just a clean system for getting buy-in without feeling like you’re gaming anyone.

» Download the full playbook

We also ran a workshop on cross-team project management with RACI. I showed you how to stop guessing who’s supposed to do what and finally run a data project without herding cats. If your projects regularly drift into “wait, who owns this again?” territory, the replay will save you a few headaches.

» Watch the video

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I played way too much ARC Raiders, and of course I ended up finding lessons for data engineers inside a video game. It turns out the gaming industry has better instincts for iteration, feedback loops, and failure than most tech teams. The post is half reflection, half “damn, they figured something out we didn’t”.

» Build better data products

I also wrote about communication, specifically how leaders with worse ideas sometimes win decisions simply because they know how to make the room feel safe. It’s not fair, but it’s real. So I broke it down.

» Steal these easy tricks

Then came two big ones.:

I showed you hows leaders know when it actually makes sense to hire a data engineer instead of panic-hiring out of ego.

» Steal the hiring strategy

And Data Professionals Are F*ing Delusional, which is probably the most honest thing I’ve written about job searching this year. A lot of people needed to hear it. But be prepared, you may feel a bit attacked.

» Read my essay

Finally, we wrapped with Why Senior Data Engineers Lose Velocity. I'm talking about the shift from being great at building systems to being responsible for the humans around the systems. It’s the part no course prepares you for.

» Survive as a senior data engineer

And on LinkedIn, I talked about something uncomfortable but important: the traits every senior engineer I’ve fired had in common. It struck a nerve, which tells you how real the problem is.

» Join the discussion

Final thoughts

What surprised me most about this month wasn’t the numbers, but the feeling. The community finally feels like a place where experienced data engineers can show up without pretending everything is fine.

I'm excited for December.

If you’re in a season where you want more clarity, more support, or just more people who actually get the work you do, this is probably the best moment to join.

https://datagibberish.com/subscribe

Thanks for reading,

Yordan