With this edition of the Monthly Python Data Engineering newsletter, it has been released the first chapter of the free book "How Data Platforms Work", aimed at explaining the internals of data platforms in a simple to understand manner for Python developers.

The first chapter takes a look at the foundations and the basics of compute engines and query execution.

This was mostly an experiment, but the core idea is to provide a simple way (no V8 or SpiderMonkey dependency) to run various preprocessors commonly used in web development without the need to integrate NodeJS in development stack. It should be fairly easy to integrate this with webassets package to automatically compile and merge CoffeeScript files.

It currently only provides the CoffeeScript compiler but I'm working on patching and porting the TypeScript compiler too.