Data Engineering & BI at Light & Wonder 101
By John Michailidis, Head of Data Engineering & BI
Engineering. A term which, until now, corresponds to people who build bridges, houses and so on.
1486 — Leonardo Da Vinci, famous for his multiple talents came up with the idea of an “ideal city”. His aim was to improve the life of the population. After the plague killed almost half the population of Milan, Leonardo thought that there must be a way that would enable him to protect the city and its people from future similar problems.
Thus, the idea of the “ideal city” was borne.
The ideal city is a theoretical urban planning construct, which would essentially make the city :
1) More united
2) Have greater and better communications
3) More sanitised and thus helping to prevent the spread of disease
His ideal city had a series of integrated canals which would be used for commercial purposes along with the sewage system. These canals would be in upper and lower areas. In each area, the canals would serve a specific purpose.
We’ll not dive into the engineering side of the ideal city (more info can be found here). By utilising a series of state of the art (for the time) engineering ideas (like hydraulics etc.) the canals were created.
Essentially, Leonardo saw a problem with architectural design of the city of Milan which allowed disease and pestilence to have a devastating effect. Being a curious mind, he perceived and created an idea of something that will make the life of the people better and increase their standard of living.
2022 — Data, Data, Data. Something that keeps coming up in data discussions is that 90% of the data has been created in the last 2 years whereas the rest 10% has been created since the beginning of the Information Science. This is “Big Data”, and it is transforming the world around us as we speak.
It’s no secret that the term engineer today represents something far broader. Historically, we had Civil Engineers, Mechanical Engineers etc. Today, we have Software Engineers, Quality Assurance Engineers and of course, Data Engineers.
Data Science was termed the sexiest job of 21st century by Harvard University. But in a surprising turn of events, Data Engineering may overtake this status.
Being a Data Engineer today is a job which requires multiple talents. First, you need to be authentically curious. You need to know and research about state of the art ways of storing, managing, validating and exposing the data.
You need to have in mind that building an ETL procedure, for example, it’s the same as building a bridge which connects the two sides of a river. Both architectural designs need to be robust, absorb changes with minimal effort and ensure that once built, will service consistently.
You need, as Leonardo, to be able to find a problematic design and create something that increases the availability and usage of the data. You need to think of the data as something alive which evolve and change as the time passes.
This is an introduction to the vast world of Data Engineering. It’s the 0.1 instalment of a series of articles where we will analyse and discuss different aspects & tools that it’s essential for a Data Engineer.
Data Engineering is a crucial part of L &W’s core aspects of data development.
We have taken upon us to fine-tune and improve the way of accessing, utilising and, at the end of the day, living with the data. The things that we are doing falls — always — under the logic “This thing I’m building — will it be robust throughout its usage?”. If the answer is yes, then we are proceeding, is the answer is no, then we are finding the next best solution that will serve everything in the optimal form. That way we are ensuring that everything is working properly, and everyone is happy.
Stay tuned for the next in our data series “The Cambrian Εxplosion of Data Engineering”
The opinions expressed in this blog post are strictly those of the author in their personal capacity. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of Light & Wonder or of its employees.
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