@kuya
Kurdapyo Data Engineer
@kuya
A old database developer's take on data engineering, cloud and data SaaS products
Sydney, AustraliaJoined June 2025
About
I’m the kuya at Kurdapyo Labs — a recovering Oracle developer who saw the light and helped migrate legacy systems out of Oracle (and saved a lot of money doing it). I used to write PL/SQL, Perl, ksh, Bash, and all kinds of hand-crafted ETL. These days, I wrestle with PySpark, Airflow, Terraform, and YAML that refuses to cooperate. I’ve been around long enough to know when things were harder… and when they were actually better. This blog is where I write (and occasionally rant) about modern data tools — especially the ones marketed as “no-code” that promise simplicity, but still break in production anyway.
Disclaimer: These are my thoughts—100% my own, not my employer’s, my client’s, or that one loud guy on tech Twitter. I’m just sharing what I’ve learned (and unlearned) along the way. No promises, no warranties—just real talk, some opinions, and the occasional coffee/beer-fueled rant.
If something here helps you out, awesome! If you think I’ve missed something or want to share your own take, I’d love to hear from you. Let’s learn from each other.
Available for
Freelance data engineering work Contract projects: data migration, cloud infra, ETL modernization Part-time consulting on data platforms Collaborations
Kurdapyo Data Engineer's blogs
Recently published
Counting when it really counts
Nov 3, 2025 · 4 min read · A seasoned data engineer is deliberate on their use of expensive operations such as counts. It’s fairly common to see a misuse of this. Such as using a count to check if a query returns some rows. Or running a count query to figure out the number of ...
Join discussionFrom For Loops to For Each
Sep 30, 2025 · 3 min read · I'm a strong advocate for using the enterprise chosen orchestration tool for complex data pipelines. However, there are instances where using that strictly is not practical, and the scheduling tool within the database itself makes more sense. Take Da...
Join discussionDatabricks Environment Splits
Aug 5, 2025 · 4 min read · Three-tier architecture was the norm when I started my IT career. It consisted of the presentation layer (the web servers), the application layer (the app servers), and the data layer (the databases). We could spin up as many environments as needed f...
Join discussion