Niraj Zade
Data Engineer

I work at the intersection of computing and data.
Typically help companies/people with data ingestion, processing, and storage on the cloud.
To unlock downstream data science and business intelligence.
At any scale.

I am a well rounded engineer, with a specialization in data. Have spent the past decade working on software, and 3 years of it working within tech companies. I bring whats's called as "business sense". Am good at negotiating tradeoffs between tech & business in the face of ambiguity & uncertainity.

More info on the about page.

Past work includes:

  • Data platform on AWS for an IoT data acquisition and device control startup
  • Enterprise data pipelines
  • Cloud data-infra compliance clearance
  • Tenant isolation
...and a lot more

Contact

Computers understanding humans makes codebases irrelevant
A consequence of good code generation models
2023 Apr 08   8 min   blog 4 gen-ai 1

Own your email's domain
Protect identity loss by owning the email's domain
2023 Feb 12   6 min   blog 4

Why python needs virtual environments
An opinion on the python package and env management shitshow
2023 Feb 04   10 min   package-management 1 python 2 blog 4

Why interpreted languages make superior scripting languages
Why {python, bash, ruby, ...} are preferred for scripting over {go, c, ...}
2023 Jan 03   1 min   blog 4

Un-nesting code for less brain-pain
Writing code that doesn't break your brain, by un-nesting if-else statements.
2024 Nov 15   6 min   software-engineering 3 art 1

Representing financial amounts in API's JSON
Json is terrible for fractional values. Only use int or str to communicate amounts in your JSON based APIs.
2024 Nov 04   3 min   api-design 1 json 1

Postgres - data types
Pg data types, and when to use them
2024 Oct 13   4 min   postgres 2 dbms 2

Postgres - index types and usage scenarios
Postgres index types, their tradeoffs, and when to use them
2024 Oct 13   7 min   postgres 2 dbms 2

Data and Computing books list
An evolving list of books
2024 Oct 07   1 min   study 1

SSH tunneling templates
SSH config templates for various scenarios
2024 Sep 22   1 min   infrastructure 2 linux 1

Software port list
An ever-expanding list of default ports of common services, for on-prem infra and home-labs.
2024 Sep 21   2 min   infra 1

UUID - versions, details, use cases
There are 8 versions of uuid, each with its own specification. You must know how a version works, to know the use cases where it can be used.
2024 Sep 13   16 min   distributed-systems 1 software-engineering 3

Git based development - Standards and Etiquette
Standards and guidelines on writing commit messages, creating branches, creating pull requests.
2024 Aug 28   9 min   git 1 conventions 1 software-engineering 3

Python unicode string comparison and normalization schemes
Universally applicable string comparison in python. For string comparisons, and for de-duplication in datasets.
2024 May 06   8 min   python 2

Currency codes - ISO 4217
ISO currency codes to use in databases and enums
2024 May 01   20 min   standard 1

Ram per core analysis of AWS EC2 instances
Ram per core statistics of AWS EC2 instances
2024 Mar 13   34 min   aws 1 infrastructure 2

SQL logical clause execution order
Like operator precedence, but for SQL clauses.
2023 Nov 15   2 min   sql 1 data-engineering 1