Data Tinkerer

How LinkedIn Built a Pipeline That Scales to 230M Records/sec Without Breaking SLAs

From partition strategy to adaptive throttling, the playbook behind Venice’s ingestion evolution.

Feb 19 • Data Tinkerer

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What the Data Crowd Was Reading in January 2026

Tools, techniques and deep dives worth reading that I came across in January 2026.

Feb 5 • Data Tinkerer

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January 2026

How to Build a Recommendation System at Scale: Insights from Instacart

A Senior ML Engineer on production constraints, rules vs ML and the workflow behind large-scale recommender systems

Jan 29 • Data Tinkerer and Ahsaas Bajaj

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How DoorDash Saves Tens of Millions of Dollars Per Year by Detecting Fraud 30× Faster

A daily anomaly detection system that cut discovery time from 100+ days to under three.

Jan 23 • Data Tinkerer

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How Grab Detects Data Issues across 100+ Kafka Topics Before They Spread

Real-time stream validation surfaces poison records early and notifies owners with context

Jan 15 • Data Tinkerer

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What the Data Crowd Was Reading in December 2025

Tools, techniques and deep dives worth reading that I came across in December 2025.

Jan 8 • Data Tinkerer

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How Uber Cut Data Lake Freshness From Hours to Minutes With Flink

Why Uber moved ingestion from Spark batch to Flink streaming and what it took to run thousands of jobs reliably at petabyte scale.

Jan 2 • Data Tinkerer

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December 2025

What is Data Governance? A Practical Guide to Building Trustworthy Data in the Age of AI

From unclear ownership to missing standards, Charlotte Ledoux breaks down the simple governance practices that help organisations trust their data and…

Dec 11, 2025 • Data Tinkerer and Charlotte Ledoux

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What the Data Crowd Was Reading in November 2025

Tools, techniques and deep dives worth reading that I came across in November 2025.

Dec 3, 2025 • Data Tinkerer

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November 2025

How Snap Rebuilt Its ML Platform to Handle 10,000+ Daily Spark Jobs

Inside Prism, the system that turned scattered Spark workflows into a unified, ML-ready platform.

Nov 20, 2025 • Data Tinkerer

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From Data Analyst to Senior DS Manager at Skyscanner

How a mechanical engineer found data through robotics. Data led to modelling. Modelling led to managing teams at Skyscanner.

Nov 13, 2025 • Data Tinkerer and Jose Parreño Garcia

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What the Data Crowd Was Reading in October 2025

Tools, techniques and deep dives worth reading that I came across in October 2025.

Nov 6, 2025 • Data Tinkerer

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