Coding for Real Estate Data
By: Maxwell Goldbas, Tech Lead at Cherre
Hi, Max! Tell us a bit about your background.
I started off with an industrial engineering degree from Virginia Tech, after that I moved on to becoming a Data Scientist in Advertising. I found data engineering and infrastructure a bit more interesting because you provide analysts and other stakeholders with tools for understanding their work, so I became a consultant at a small boutique firm. As a consultant, I built out infrastructure for AARP, NYU and a few other companies. I am now a tech lead at Cherre where I build out data pipelines for linking together real estate data.
What do you work on?
I work on making it easier for data to come together around real estate entities; mainly lots, buildings and apartments. There are many real estate data providers however the data is siloed for each company. Our technology allows data to become linked together through GraphQL so you can type in an address and get all of the data back from various partners in a single API call.
How do you use coding in your work?
Our main infrastructure is Python, SQL and Docker. Python is flexible and easy to use, so we have built out different ways of taking data from our various partners and getting it into our system. Once data is in our system, we transform it with SQL to ensure it’s formed properly and ready to be served in our API. All servers and tasks are containerized with Docker to ensure our local, sandbox and production environments are the same. Docker is a fantastic technology, and I’m thankful I get to work with it.
Have any computer science insights to share with young coders?
Do not underestimate domain knowledge. There is an old saying in computer science “When you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail”, thus many young programmers come at problems using their past experiences to apply the tools they already know without getting context for the value of their work. I recommend talking to industry experts and domain analysts to truly understand the value of your work prior to starting a project. Ensure that their advice is laden in your application.
What are the tools and programming languages you use?
- Python
- Singer
- SQL
- Bash
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Google Cloud
- GraphQL
I am a tech urbanite with a french bulldog, come with hard questions.
