Reaching 20k+ readers on Medium and over 3k learners by email, I draw on my 4 years of experience as a Senior Data Engineer to demystify data science, cloud and programming concepts while sharing job hunt strategies so you can land and excel in data-driven roles. Subscribe for 500 words of actionable advice every Thursday.
[ETR #35] AI Can Train You In DE
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 |
Extract. Transform. Read.
Reaching 20k+ readers on Medium and over 3k learners by email, I draw on my 4 years of experience as a Senior Data Engineer to demystify data science, cloud and programming concepts while sharing job hunt strategies so you can land and excel in data-driven roles. Subscribe for 500 words of actionable advice every Thursday.
Hi fellow data professional! This edition almost became an apology because I’ve been on a tight deadline and pre-baby morning wake up thinking/writing time has become GSD (get sh!t done) hour. Long story short: I got brought in late to a time-sensitive project that required me to speed through a planned pipeline migration. As a recovering news junkie (aka journalist), I used to live and die by deadlines. But, given the unpredictability of data-oriented work and internal deliverables, it’s...
Hi fellow data professional! For years, the opening of The Simpsons, specifically Bart writing lines on the chalkboard, has been incredibly relatable to me. Not because I’m up to mischief (none I’ll admit to here, anyway), but because I spend most days writing the same three lines of SQL over and over again. If you've ever been paranoid about a table's content, you might know what I'm talking about. It’s the aggregate COUNT(*) grouped by a date field, ordered by date DESC. The output of that...
Hi fellow data professional! In a previous newsletter, I mentioned an idea that I wanted to explore deeper. At the risk of double-quoting a la The Office’s Michael Scott quoting Wayne Gretzky (“You Miss 100% Of The Shots You Don’t Take - Waynze Gretzky - Michael Scott”), here is the idea. “To be marketable as a candidate, you don’t just want to show how you can go from A to B (requirements->pipeline). You need to go from A to C (requirements->pipeline->scale/support).” You might be asking...