Subscribe to my mailing list for free tips, daily!I help data leaders transform their organisation to one where data becomes information - trusted, governed, and federated across the business - and guaranteed with data contracts.Services include:- Project/program support- Training- Consulting calls- Assessments and reviews- Ongoing advisorySee https://andrew-jones.com for more information.

I joined GoCardless in 2017 as their first data engineer, tasked with building a data platform from scratch.This was a great opportunity! The team and I followed basically the reference architecture of the time, starting with implementing a change data capture (CDC) service to bring all the data in to a centralised data warehouse, where it could be used by consumers.However, we started noticing the same problems that everyone else in data seemed to be having. The data was unreliable. It took vast amounts of effort and money to transform it into something of use. There was a disconnect between consumers and generators, who had no idea what the others were doing with this data.The data was of poor quality, with no expectations set on its usability or reliability.I started thinking "there must be a better way!". Why can't we have a well defined interface for data, like we do in other places, such as APIs? How can we bring data generators and consumers closer together, so they have a shared sense of ownership over the positive business value we can generate with data? What does the tooling look like that would facilitate this culture change?This led to me inventing Data Contracts - a new architecture pattern that drives the culture change needed to becoming a truly data driven organisation.We started rolling this out in 2021, and I wrote a blog post on it. That got noticed, and before I knew it I was on podcasts, interviews, and presenting at conferences about the hottest trend in data engineering since data mesh!We're still on our data journey at GoCardless, and I continue to write and speak about what we're learning in the hope of helping others finally achieve that return on investment in data that we've been promising for decades.

I first joined ARM in 2006 for a one year placement position as part of my University course and accepted the offer to come back once I graduated in 2008.For the first half of my time at ARM I was a software engineer, working on various projects that enabled our verification engineers to run workloads efficiently on our high performance compute clusters.That ended up generating a lot of data! So from 2012 I led the creation of a data platform to collect, store and analyse that verification data. It also expanded to other uses cases, including infrastructure and storage data.This data platform was used by all of ARM’s CPU projects for business critical reporting and day-to-day analysis.I left ARM in 2017, deciding to specialise in the data industry.

Worked on the Foswiki open source wiki both as part of my role at ARM and also outside of work. Developed and contributed to a number plugins and became a core contributor.Being part of an open source project was a great way for me to learn how to work inside a remote team with different personalities and different priorities.