:Sad_Face: Why You Should Emojize Your Boring Data Alerts

Data engineers: Use a Python library to highlight data downtimes, scheduled jobs and other logging information.

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One useless skill you develop and quickly excel at working remotely is the tactical use of emojis. And I don’t mean like slipping a smiley face in an email. I mean everyone from interns to c-suite players will share business-critical information accompanied by everyone’s favorite byte-sizing outsourcing of emotion.

As an aside, naturally, once you’ve sent your thousandth prayer hands reaction, you start to venture out and upload new photos to be used as future vehicles of communication. I won’t share the photo, but the unicode for mine is, fittingly, :florida_man:.

And though conversation using emojis can be fun, there is one dimension of data engineering that can benefit from the additional visibility that emojis offer: Flagging errors in logs and automated alerting messages.

Due to the need to constantly monitor the loading or failure of data pipelines, data engineers receive a lot of alerts during the work day (and on-call if your org subjects you to such rotations). Unfortunately, text is limited when it comes to expressing a priority level. You could bold or underline a word or phrase. Or you could use…