The Data Engineering Zoomcamp kicked off today, and I’m excited to get started! I’ll be creating short posts throughout my learning journey noting some thoughts on the week-to-week assignments and projects, with a focus on roadblocks or challenges that I find intriguing.
I’ve had an interest in data engineering for a while and been looking forways to deepen my knowledge around it. Namely,
- Data’s become an increasingly important part of the modern economy. Across industries, data pipelines and a solid data foundation are crucial to developing customer insights, visualizing performance, and creating the right kinds of data products. I want to learn more about best practices and industry standards for working with data at scale in a maintanable way.
- Data engineering is a prerequisite for newly developing fields like analytics and machine learning engineering, both areas that I’m interested in learning more about. I want to develop a sufficient baseline knowledge in DE to support further learning in those areas.
- I want to be able to develop my own data pipelines; I have ideas for data products I’d like to develop as a hobby, especially for use in fantasy sports, and think this course will be a great environment to begin exploring those ideas.
- Becoming a better software developer. Data engineering is a subset of a software engineering with many moving pieces and ever-evolving tech; exposure to a different area than strict software development will strengthen my engineering skills and help me continue to hone my problem-solving and software architecture skills.
On top of the zoomcamp, I’m also spending my time over the next few months focusing on:
- My Elixir learning - there’s some really cool stuff happening in the world of Elixir. I’m espeically interested in the recent announcement about gradual types, as well the expansion of Elixir’s machine learning ecosystem.
- Coursera’s Tableau BI Developer Certificate - I want to get at least some exposure to a data visualization tool, and Tableau is a prominent one. This course also dedicates time to data warehousing and analytics concepts, as well as the business side of data analytics and engineering. Too often, engineers forget to tie their work to broader business goals, so I’m enjoying the focus of the certificate on the business intelligence side.
