Time flies, 2025 is over, 2026 has begun.

Let’s review the past year.

At Work

It was the beginning of my journey with Azure and Databricks. This was the occasion to me to learn lot of new things. I already worked on a Public Cloud, GCP, by the past and I found the transition to Azure very smooth. Product names are differents but concepts are the same. The only “strange” thing about Azure is there are multiple products to do the “same thing”. Databricks is a very interesting product, I think the best value added is about the unified view. In the same interface, your are able to manage your workloads with a Spark on demand, your workflow with Databricks Workflow (the most underrated Databricks product in my opinion), your data governance with Unity Catalog and your dashboard : an unified experience for the analytics. This was also the occasion to grab some badges about Lakehouse fundamentals, Databricks fundamentals and DBT fundamentals, I don’t know if it’s useful but it’s fun.

After 5 years as Tech Lead, I started a new position as Data Architect. Was an interesting move that enable to learn new things, particularly on the design area.

Conferences

I had the change to attempt to Devoxx France where I mainly watched talks about AI but also about data structures and compute engines, about Docker and about organisation. I published 3 posts (in French) to share my Devoxx experience.

I also attended to Databricks Data AI World Tour in Paris, at this event, I was able to networking and discuss about Databricks. This event confirmed that AI is everywhere and even if discussions was very interesting I didn’t really discover new things.

Side projects

I launched a new side project named Duzzy (https://github.com/bhagenbourger/duzzy). Duzzy is a data generation tool that aims to facilitate the generation of synthetic data.

I also wrote one post about how to “Design maintainable batch data pipelines“.

Even if I miss time, I still continue to maintain, with mainly technical improvement, my Android App named “My Cellar” which is useful to manage my Wine Cellar : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.hagenbourger.mycellar&hl=fr

Outside of tech

Having a second child reduced considerably my spare time but was still able to run more than 100km per month and I broke my personal record on 10km by going under the 39 minutes.

Personal thought

In my opinion, with the renew of SQL which is everywhere to manage data, the increasing power of Cloud Data Platforms, the raise of declarative pipelines and the evolution of AI Coding Assistant, Analytics Engineers are more and more autonomous. With this situation, a data plumber to bring datasets to the Data Analysts is no longer essential, Data Ops and Analytics can now collaborate directly on the platform, without the intervention of Data Engineers.

I think, in the coming years, Data Engineers will gradually disappear from analytical use cases and will remain relevant only for real-time processing and data intensive backend services.

Next year

At work, a new challenge is coming, stay tuned.

Inside the tech, I will try to continue my side projects and also plan to publish 12 posts (one per month).

Outside the tech, I will continue to run, for pleasure, with at least 3 sessions per week.

Consistency is key to reach objectives, a small step each day is a big step by the end of the year.