How to join the Free 6-week Data Engineer Boot Camp!

I’m releasing a free six week program for data engineers to level up and get better!

The content can be found both on the DataExpert.io Community Academy, as well as on YouTube!

If you want to take it for credit, you will need to watch through the DataExpert.io platform and submit your homework there as well. AI will automatically grade your homework and you can submit it as many times as you’d like!

Certified students will watch about 40 hours of content and submit 8 homework assignments. Plan to spend 5-10 hours a week on this if you’re experienced and 15-20 if you are not experienced!

The Curricula

Week 0: Database setup and Boot Camp Kickoff

• Boot Camp Kickoff

• Database setup

Week 1: Dimensional Data Modeling

• Cumulative Tables and complex data types (lab is here)

• Generating Slowly Changing Dimensions (lab is here)

• Graph Data Modeling (lab is here)

Week 2: Fact Data Modeling (full 4 hour course)

• Fact Data Modeling fundamentals

• The Facebook Datelist Data Structure

• Long array metrics and minimizing shuffle

Week 3: Apache Spark

• Spark Basics

• Advanced Spark Concepts and memory tuning

• Unit Testing and Integration testing Spark jobs

Week 4: Apache Flink and Kafka (full 3 hour course)

• Kafka fundamentals and basics

• Streaming pipelines basics

• How to manage window functions

Week 5: Data Quality

• Build Data documentation like Airbnb

• write, audit, publish pattern and data contracts

• Analytical patterns (funnel analysis)

• Analytical patterns (growth accounting)

Week 6: Communication and impact

• Data impact, communication and visualization with Tableau

• KPIs and Experimentation with Statsig

• Data pipeline maintenance

Deadlines

You should be shooting to finish homework each week to stay ahead of the game! All the boot camp content will be paywalled and removed from YouTube again on August 16th!

Over 42,000 people have signed up for this. I expect about 400 of you to complete it because free materials are hard to stay motivated.

To stay motivated you should:

• Register for the boot camp here (we’ll send you plenty of notifications)

• Join the community discord here

• Bring a friend or two along with you for the ride!

• Please star and clone the Data Engineer Handbook (this Github is where all the homework and materials are located)

• Learn in public and post your learnings each week on LinkedIn and X! Tag Zach Wilson and he might repost your learnings!

• Install Docker and practice a little bit of SQL here!

I’m excited for you to join! I’m launching a 5 week AI Engineering boot camp that starts on July 7th as well!

In this boot camp, we will be covering:

• using AI to be 100% more productive with tools like Cursor and Windsurf

• building RAG systems to minimize LLM hallucination

• building AI agent workflows

• fine tuning open source models

• MLOps

The first 5 people can use code FREEBOOTCAMPFTW for 30% off on DataExpert.io.