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J Fowler
J Fowler

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Want to get started as a Data Engineer

Level Up Your Data Engineering Game!

Get the Basics Down:

  • Dive into data engineering essentials
  • Play around with big data tools and cloud stuff
  • Get comfy with SQL and a coding language (Python's a good bet)

Pick a Cool Problem:

  • Choose something that gets you excited (sports stats, stock market, food delivery, weather, crypto, etc.)
  • Make sure it's meaty enough to show off your skills

Hunt Down Some Data:

  • Find a juicy dataset or API for your chosen topic
  • The messier and bigger, the better (within reason!)

Build Your Data Playground:

  • Whip up a smart data model
  • Set it up in PostgreSQL (or your database of choice)
  • Make it sing with some optimization magic

Craft a Slick ETL Pipeline:

  • Something like this could work: Raw data → S3 → Glue (Spark) → S3 (transformed) → Crawler → Athena
  • Feel free to mix and match tools to fit your style

Show It Off:

  • Document your journey (the good, the bad, and the ugly)
  • Whip up some cool visuals to make your data pop
  • Throw it up on GitHub or your own site
  • Blog about it if you're feeling extra fancy

Make It Count:

  • Slap that project on your resume
  • Use it to dazzle interviewers with your mad skills
  • Keep tinkering with it to show you're always learning

There you have it! A recipe for data engineering awesomeness. Now go out there and build something cool!

What else would you do? A different stack? Let me know in the comments.

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