Comprehensive Analysis of Reddit Data Engineering Using Pushshift API and PMAW

Introduction

In the ever-evolving field of data engineering, understanding community discussions and trends is crucial. This project focuses on the 'r/dataengineering' subreddit, employing a robust data pipeline to extract, process, and analyze data. By integrating various tools and technologies, we aim to provide valuable insights into the topics and discussions shaping the data engineering landscape.

Summary

This report delves into the analysis of the 'r/dataengineering' subreddit, utilizing advanced data retrieval and processing techniques. By leveraging the Pushshift API, PMAW, asyncpraw, and DuckDB, the project efficiently gathers and stores data, which is then analyzed using BigQuery and dbt for NLP insights. The findings are presented in an interactive dashboard.

Data Extraction and Processing

The project begins with data extraction from Reddit using the Pushshift API and PMAW. These tools allow for efficient retrieval of submission and comment data. The use of asyncpraw further enhances data collection by enabling asynchronous processing, which is crucial for handling large datasets. The data is then stored in DuckDB, a high-performance database that supports convenient upserts. For more details, refer to the GitHub repository.

Data Storage and Analysis

Once the data is stored in DuckDB, it is uploaded to BigQuery for advanced analysis. Using dbt, the data is modeled and prepared for NLP analysis, allowing us to identify key topics and trends within the subreddit. The integration with BigQuery facilitates large-scale data processing and analysis. Check out the flow script for more information.

Dashboard and Insights

The final step involves creating a dashboard that showcases the top submissions by topic. This interactive tool allows users to explore the data and gain insights into the most discussed topics in the subreddit. The dashboard is powered by TF-IDF analysis, which scores submissions based on comments and upvotes. For implementation details, see the utility functions.

Conclusion

The analysis of the 'r/dataengineering' subreddit reveals key topics and trends within the data engineering community. By utilizing a comprehensive data pipeline, we successfully extracted and analyzed data, providing actionable insights through a user-friendly dashboard. This project demonstrates the power of combining modern data tools to gain a deeper understanding of online discussions.

🔒
Free Public Preview, Only Visible to Subscribers