Youssef Mroue Data Engineering Ed. 2.1

Correspondence Contents

Personal Abstract Edition 2.1 ymroue.com

Youssef Mroue

يوسف مروِّة

Building reliable data infrastructure at scale, one mental breakdown at a time

Table 1. Summary Compiled from record; figures marked ‡ recomputed at page load
Series Unit Value Note
Present post — Principal BI Engineer ‡
Organisation — Alaska Airlines
Station — Seattle, Wash.
Time in post months — ‡
Time in field years — ‡
Posts held count 4
Degrees and certificates count 3
Works catalogued count — ‡
Public repositories count 2
Throughput, latency, unit cost — not disclosed †
Hours slept — not disclosed †

† Employer data. Not mine to publish, and the second one is not mine to admit.

‡ Computed from record on load; accurate to the day, which is more than can be said for most dashboards.

Abstract

Fig. 1

Architecting, Modeling, Engineering, Breaking, and Perfecting Data infrastructure.

At Alaska Airlines that means PySpark and Azure Databricks: building and maintaining the lakehouse pipelines that carry operational data from the systems producing it to the people and models depending on it. Most of the work is reliability: schema drift, late-arriving data, and backfills.

Before Alaska I spent two and a half years at Texas Children's Hospital as a pathology data analyst. Before that, Baker Hughes, where I learned that most problems filed as data problems are definitional: two teams measuring the same thing differently, and neither one aware of it.

I came to engineering through mathematics: a B.S. from the University of Houston, a post-baccalaureate certificate in data analytics from Rice, and two years as a teaching assistant there. Teaching a subject is still the most reliable way I know to find the gaps in your own understanding of it.

Fig. 1. Youssef Mroue.

Employment

2019 —
Table 2. Posts held, by period Reverse chronological
Period Post Organisation
Principal BI Engineer Alaska Airlines
Pathology Data Analyst Texas Children's Hospital
Teaching Assistant Rice University
Data Analyst Baker Hughes

Current post marked in the ink; — months at time of reading.

Instruction and certification

2015 —
Table 3. Degrees, certificates and credentials Reverse chronological
Issued Award Institution
Certified Data Engineer Associate Databricks
Post-Bacc. Certificate, Data Analytics and Visualization Rice University
B.S. Mathematics University of Houston

Post-baccalaureate curriculum: Python, R, JavaScript, SQL databases, Tableau, big data and machine learning.

Classification of competencies

4 classes
Table 4. Competencies, by class and series Ordered by present use
Class Series
4.1 Distributed processing
  • PySpark and Apache Spark
  • Pipeline development and ETL
  • Azure Databricks Lakehouse and data modelling
4.2 Databases and query
  • Oracle SQL and Spark SQL
  • Lakehouse (Databricks) and Azure Delta Lake
  • MSSQL and MongoDB
4.3 Languages and tooling
  • Python, PySpark, JavaScript
  • SQL, R, ASP
  • Azure Data Factory and Synapse
4.4 Mathematics and machine learning
  • Neural networks and deep learning
  • Clustering and decision trees
  • Statistical inference and probability

Catalogue of works

—
Table 5. Works, with classification and references Entries carrying a plate are reproduced below
No. Entry Classification References
Compiling catalogue…

Correspondence

Colophon

open to considering lobotomies

Sources