Welcome to my technical blog! I’m Daniel B. Christensen, a Senior Data Engineer at The Walt Disney Company, and I’m excited to share insights from my journey building data infrastructure at scale.

Why This Blog?

After 7+ years in data engineering, I’ve accumulated knowledge that I believe can help others navigate the complex world of data pipelines, real-time processing, and cloud infrastructure. This blog will serve as a platform to share:

  • Technical deep-dives into data engineering challenges and solutions
  • Best practices for building scalable, maintainable data systems
  • Performance optimization techniques that have saved companies millions
  • Real-world case studies from my work at Disney, SAVVBI, and VIVBI

What I’ve Been Working On

Disney: Enterprise-Scale Real-Time Analytics

At Disney, I’ve been focused on building systems that can handle scale. Some highlights:

  • Performance Optimization: Improved event-based data query performance by 30% through advanced Snowflake optimization
  • Cost Management: Implemented comprehensive Snowflake cost reduction strategies
  • Real-Time Processing: Built Apache Flink pipelines for streaming analytics
  • Data Modeling: Created ML-ready data models with strict SLA adherence

Key Technologies in My Stack

  • Streaming: Apache Flink, Kafka, AWS Kinesis
  • Data Warehousing: Snowflake, BigQuery, PostgreSQL
  • Orchestration: Apache Airflow with custom monitoring
  • APIs: FastAPI for high-throughput data ingestion
  • Cloud: AWS, Azure with infrastructure-as-code

What’s Coming

I’m planning to cover topics like:

  1. Building Sub-2-Minute Data Pipelines - The architecture behind real-time analytics at scale
  2. Snowflake Cost Optimization - How to reduced compute costs by 30% and increasing performance
  3. Apache Flink for Data Engineers - Practical patterns for stream processing
  4. API-First Data Platforms - Lessons from building systems that handle 2M+ requests/month
  5. Data Quality at Scale - Monitoring and validation strategies for enterprise data

Let’s Connect

I’m always interested in discussing data engineering challenges and solutions. Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or check out my other work:

Looking forward to sharing more insights of enterprise data engineering!