0.0 — DATA ENGINEER
Sam·Malik
Building data infrastructure that's honest about what it measures.
I'm a data person wrapping up a B.S. in Informatics (Data Science) at the University of Washington. By day I build data pipelines and dashboards and write the quality checks that keep the numbers honest, mostly in Python and SQL. Off the clock I'm usually deep in a record I'm overthinking, somewhere in a room full of fog at a show, or digging through racks for secondhand grails. This site is both halves in one place: the work, and the taste behind it.
0.1 — HOW I THINK ABOUT THE WORK
Data, technology, and culture are one loop.
I think of data, technology, and culture as one recursive feedback loop, each one constantly rewriting the next. Data engineering is how you step into that loop on purpose.
FIG. 0.1 — DATA → TECHNOLOGY → CULTURE → DATA
DATA → TECHNOLOGY. The data we collect ends up dictating the tools we build to handle it. Around 3400 BCE, Mesopotamian scribes were pressing grain tallies and labor records into clay, and the sheer volume of that accounting is what pushed them to invent cuneiform in the first place. The dataset created the technology.
TECHNOLOGY → CULTURE. Those tools then change how people live and what they treat as real. Double-entry bookkeeping in the 15th century was a data technology, and it helped make modern capitalism thinkable in the first place. The census, from Rome to the Domesday Book to today, turned populations into records, and in doing so it reshaped what it even meant to be a citizen of a state.
CULTURE → DATA. And culture decides what's worth recording at all, which closes the loop and changes what data exists in the first place. A society that decides something matters starts measuring it. A recommendation system turns your behavior into data, trains on it, and nudges the behavior it was measuring. Same loop the scribes started, just running faster.
None of this is new. Datafication is one of the constants of recorded human history. What's new is the speed and the stakes. Building data infrastructure means stepping into that loop, deciding what becomes legible and making sure the record stays honest about what it's actually measuring. That's the part I care about most.
Track record
Experience
Education, roles, tools, and measurable impact. →
0.4Built things
Projects
Pipelines, databases, models, and what I learned building them. →
0.5Notebook
Writing
Short essays on data systems, feedback, and governance. →
0.6The shelf
Reading
Last, current, next, and what I made of each. →
0.7Signal
Connect
Email, LinkedIn, GitHub. →
0.8 — WHAT I'M LISTENING TO
The music.
My taste sits at two poles: warped, maximal rap on one side and the coldest end of black and drone metal on the other. Here's the all-time list and what I've rated lately, pulled straight from my RateYourMusic.
Favorite artists · all time
Recently rated
- Lucy Bedroque · Unmusique2025
- Nine Inch Nails · The Downward Spiral1994
- Jaja00 · BlackBolshevik2021
- Clipse · Let God Sort Em Out2025
- Playboi Carti · Music2025
RATEYOURMUSIC
251 ratings and counting. The full archive of what I've been listening to, scoring, and overthinking lives on my RYM.
View my RYM →0.9 — ROOMS FULL OF FOG
Concert log.
Some of the best rooms I've stood in. Featured: Sunn O))), Travis Scott, and Carcass.
