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:

• Providing experience level context and desired trajectory: “I have 2 years’ experience with SQL but I’d like to learn more about CTEs as they relate to query optimization”
• Prompting the LLM to explain concepts as they relate to a specific role: “Show me examples of how a data engineer might use this skill/tool to build a data pipeline”
• Repeating subject matter for confirmation: “Let me make sure I have this right, certain Python versions are no longer compatible with Pandas?”
• Code correction/optimization: “How might I make this code more concise?”
• Demonstrating errors: “What are the common errors associated with this method? How might I troubleshoot? How might I handle the errors?“

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