About - Data Gibberish

I’ve seen this countless times. You keep the data flowing across pipelines, models, and dashboards. Your plumbing is invisible, but every team depends on it.

When something breaks, you’re the first to be pinged, but when everything works, nobody notices you.

You spend your months keeping data fresh, reliable, and affordable. When it’s time to show results, the credit usually goes to dashboards and reports instead of the people who keep them alive.

When budgets, roadmaps, or reviews happen, your work isn’t part of the conversation.

If you want your team out of constant urgent fixes, the next request prioritised or declined without a fight, and your work seen by the people who fund the team, I write about how to get all three.

Every piece I write is where the tech meets the business. Half of it is engineering judgement (whether the code is good enough, whether the hype is real, build or buy, which project to stop), and the other half is making that judgement convincing to people who don’t read code.

All of it is meant to get you from mid level to lead, with the skills in hand before anyone gives you the title.

The cost of staying invisible

Being remembered when it matters is the real stake here, more than being recognized in the moment.

When a reorg hits, the work tied to outcomes stays. When budgets shrink, only what’s easy to defend survives.

And when review season comes, “excellent“ often turns into “but we couldn’t make a case for more right now“.

Every cycle you wait, the gap grows:

Pay that doesn’t match the scope you carry
Projects that stall before they earn visibility
Work with no proof when leadership asks for outcomes

It won’t close on its own, and doing more work won’t fix it either. You need a way to show what your work is worth before anyone asks.

Who it’s for

It’s for experienced data and analytics engineers, analysts, and data scientists, technically strong already.

Most people I coach and write for are in a very similar situation: a small data team at a scale-up of a couple of hundred employees, short of budget and people, whose strongest engineer already does much of a lead’s job without the title.

The questions I’m asked most come from there, about which request matters and how to say “not now” so it holds, how to ship a project in steps, and how to get a yes from people who outrank you.

It isn’t for you in your first couple of years, or if you want tutorials on the stack.

What I write against

I write against generic career advice, the kind that comes down to applying to 200 jobs or motivational posts on LinkedIn, and against management advice written for people who already have the title and the direct reports.

Most of all I write against the belief that getting better at the tech is what gets you to the next level, which is bullshit I held on to for half my career.

Why I write this

I was a great engineer and moved to senior fast.

Then I got handed a team, and I was terrible at it. I kept acting like an engineer instead of a lead. Someone even left because of me. I hated the politics that came with the job.

So I left. I joined a new company as an individual contributor, and I turned down every lead offer that came my way for years.

In that time, I read the books and listened to the podcasts. But mostly I learned by watching the good leaders around me and paying attention to what they did differently.

Then one day, someone told me I was the the org chart changed and the team moved under me. I was leading the team for months without noticing.

I love it now.

I spent half my career pouring everything into the technical side of the job and ignoring the other half. That other half decides your scope and your pay. I learned that by failing at it first.

This is what I wish someone had handed me back when I got that team and had no idea what to do with it.

What I do

I’m Head of Data Engineering, where I co-lead the data team with my Director of Data Analytics. We report the the CEO and work with the CFO, the CPTO and the COO.

Just my four years in data include due diligence on 4 M&A deals (2 mergers, 2 acquisitions), the data platform behind a $73M Series C, and a 70% cut in Snowflake costs, with the money reinvested in headcount and AI/ML.

I’m one of Bulgaria’s Top 100 Tech Talents, and the only data person on that list. My own career goes from software engineer, to data engineer, and to head of data engineering.

Outside work, my wife and I live away from the big city, in the house we built ourselves. After nearly 10 years, living here is still the best decision of my life.

I’m decent with electricity and building, I play computer games, organise tech events, and lately I’m learning Mandarin. My superpowers are that I only need 4 to 6 hours of sleep a night and have phenomenal memory.

What Data Gibberish gives you

Every week, I write about the part of the job nobody teaches:

How to make your technical work visible
How to talk to people who don’t care about your stack
How to get credit for what you already do

There’s also a paid tier, playbooks, live coaching sessions, and deeper frameworks, for anyone who wants to go further. Also, the annual subscription includes my digital twin, in the form of AI assistant built as an MCP server that answers the way I would

See what’s included in the membership.