Extract. Transform. Read.A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! Software engineers can package anything— including buzzwords. “Learn new, industry-relevant skills” was compressed to “upskilling.” And while I’m a proponent of continuous learning, especially when it helps you avoid stagnation, at the end of the day, upskilling is a lot of work. Without proper structure and no mandate from a school or employer, it’s difficult to remain engaged, no matter how interesting the content. My Udemy cart with 5 unfinished courses can attest to that. So when I wanted to brush up on the ever-relevant PySpark, I booked some time with Professor LLM; LLMs like Google’s Gemini (my choice to be compatible with my GCP tech stack) make incredible teachers because, like a real tutor, they can engage in a dialogue and adjust to your learning style on the fly. As a former tutor, I appreciate that it explains concepts as it provides results. This is the educational equivalent of “showing your work.” To get the most out of your chat bot study sesh, I recommend:
Lost in the AI hype is the power of being able to streamline simple tasks. I did this recently by using function calls to automate the conversion of Google Docs to markdown files I can render as blog posts. Answering a string of questions as a “teacher” isn’t as revolutionary as an AI creating “original” movies or podcasts. But by optimizing your learning, you’re creating an abundance of something far more valuable: Time. Thanks for ingesting, -Zach Quinn |
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Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from PipelineToDE Hi past, present or future data professional! Despite crushing autocorrect scenarios, most AI code assistants like CoPilot miss a critical step when helping developers of any experience level: Validation. Arguably, leveraging an AI Agent to validate a code’s quality is on the user. But a surprising amount of experienced programmers are taking the worrying approach of believing an AI’s first “thought” when it comes to code that will...
Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present or future data professional! A data science manager recently gave me some blunt, liberating advice over coffee: “If a team lead really cares what cloud technology you know (AWS, GCP, etc.) and doesn’t consider transferable experience… run.” This critical advice, which informs the conclusion of my soon-to-be-released ebook on data engineering project development, cuts to the core of a major problem in data hiring: The...
Extract. Transform. Read. A newsletter from Pipeline Hi past, present, or future data professional! For all of the latest tech trends that come and go, one idea has always persisted in the tech world: Longevity isn’t cool. I say this because I recently hit a professional milestone: 4 years with my current organization. My career trajectory offers a counter-narrative to the “job-hopping is the only way to succeed” mentality. My goal isn't to convince you to be a “lifer,” but to demonstrate...