Extract. Transform. Read.
An Absence, Explained
Explaining a gap in my newsletter, Extract. Transform. Read. and providing project tips.
The following short read is an excerpt from my weekly newsletter, Extract. Transform. Read. sent to 2,500+ aspiring data professionals. If you enjoy this snippet, you can sign up and receive your free project ideation guide.
Breaking a 40-week streak, I did not send an issue of Extract. Transform. Read. the week of 3/23/25; it turns out, I had a good reason. Here is my note to readers.
Loyal reader and ETR email opener, I want to apologize for not delivering an issue as planned last week.
Somewhat unexpectedly, my wife ended up delivering our baby boy 2 weeks early; thankfully, both are happy and healthy (albeit a bit tired).
My son’s birth triggered my employee leave and I’m currently taking a 2-month break from my day job, returning by June 2025 (I’m very fortunate to be able to take this time because in the US paternity leave is provided by an employer, not the federal government).
Since I have many late nights ahead, I will likely continue to publish when I can because once babies fall asleep you do get some free time.
I initially planned to create a comprehensive backlog of scheduled posts, but my son had other plans.
I plan to resume weekly sends of this newsletter, which I now write as a 2-week-year-old rests on my chest.
In addition to mentally cataloguing unwritten thoughts, I also have the following unresolved projects you might find interesting.
You’re welcome to pick them up or use my idea as the basis for your own work.
AI-Based Financial Planner
I had the rough code and a prompt for this a few days before “the big day. “ Here is part of the prompt:
My pre-tax monthly income is {}. This month’s credit card spend was {}. My fixed expenses are {}. Assume I invest 15% pre-tax into a 401K and roughly $250/paycheck into an HSA. After accounting for pre-tax investments, fixed expenses and discretionary spending, how much capital do I have left to invest?
Look out for a blog post on how I create data sources for each variable mentioned.
Combining stray tables into a DataMart
Data lakes may be the hot data storage framework, but DataMarts continue to be the industry standard for creating aggregated data sources.
In the past I’ve written about how I created a data pipeline to help me gain insights into my blog performance. I published a similar piece on how I applied that pipeline to a Medium publication I co-edit.
I had a plan to combine multiple data sources into what I would call publication_datamart. The JOINs are pretty simple but if it ends up being particularly complex, I’ll write about it.
Move outdated projects to “Archived Portfolio”
Since folks are increasingly discovering me through Medium/GitHub, I want to ensure my portfolio is current and reflects my current level of competency, which I’ve written about previously.
Whether you have 1 or 10 years of professional experience, this is a project that takes little effort to execute but leaves you with that spring clean feeling once complete.
Another backlog I have is emails/LinkedIn messages. If you reach out, I do my best to respond, but given my current sleep-deprived situation, I can’t promise there won’t be a bit of delay.
And there will definitely be misspellings.
Thanks for your understanding and, as always, thanks for ingesting,
-Zach Quinn
