Don’t Get Cocky: 5 Confidence Shortcuts That Will Break Your Production Pipelines
As you gain proficiency, you gain confidence; this can lead to cutting corners — and the potential to make big mistakes.
As the great Han Solo once said “Don’t get cocky.”
Confidence in technical work, especially data engineering, like everything else, works best in moderation.
Too little confidence and you’ll collapse when debugging, whether there’s deadline pressure or not. You’ll overthink and over engineer.
Not good.
However, have too much confidence, and you’ll find yourself cutting corners, deploying error-riddled code and eroding your credibility in the process.
As an engineer who eventually gained both competence and confidence, I’ve noticed that while my past mistakes resulted from flawed logic, most of my current mistakes are the result of rushed, incomplete development.
When you start to feel like you've "got this," you’ll be tempted to take shortcuts in five major areas of the deployment process. Taking them might save you ten minutes today, but they'll cost you ten hours on a Saturday morning when the data freshness alerts start firing.
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