I’ve been working fairly fluidly over the last few weeks, trying to strike a balance between covering a decent breadth of skills and keeping the learning varied. Some areas, especially the completely new ones can be pretty intense, so mixing things up a bit feels like a sensible way to use this time well and, importantly, actually enjoy the process.
With that in mind, here’s a quick summary of what I’ve been working on recently, along with what’s coming next.
Data engineering with Azure & Databricks
I’ve really enjoyed this project, particularly working with Databricks, which was new to me. It didn’t take long to see why it’s so widely used, especially for projects dealing with larger volumes of data.
The bulk of the work is now complete, with the main remaining piece being the BI layer to surface the data.
I originally planned to use Power BI for this, but on second thought I decided it would be more useful to demonstrate another widely adopted tool as well. I’ve settled on Tableau, and I’m aiming to have that work finished during w/c Monday 5th January.
One other change from the original spec is that I’ve stripped out CI/CD and DevOps from this project. Rather than bolt them on here, I’ve decided to tackle them as a separate set of focused pieces instead (more on that below).
There’s already a partial write-up on the portfolio page, which I’ll complete once the BI work is done.
CI/CD & DevOps
Although I’m familiar with CI/CD and DevOps concepts, I hadn’t really incorporated them into my previous data projects.
So I’m approaching this in a few clear phases:
-
CI/CD for this website using GitHub Actions
This is already in place and working. I’ll be writing this up properly during w/c Monday 5th January 2026. -
CI/CD in a Power BI / Fabric workflow
This will form a v2 of the UK data job market insights project, alongside a few other enhancements, including introducing MCP. I’ll be starting this straight after completing the pieces above. -
Layering in DevOps
Once the CI/CD foundations are solid, I’ll look at how DevOps practices fit more broadly across these projects.
More to come soon.