When building a career in data engineering, you’ll find yourself in a sea of technological choices and soft skills. Understanding that each of these skills has a learning path and also acknowledging diminishing returns can help you optimizing your career path.
In this article, we’ll talk about principles of learning and how you should focus your attention for a more successful career in data engineering.
Learning Principle 1: Focus on the Floor
When learning technical things, they can seem boring at best and painful at worst. You’ll find some days you’ll have a ton of energy to eat through the boredom and pain and other days you’ll be screaming at your computer. The best data engineers are determined by what they do on the days that they want to throw their computer out the window.
On these days, one of the brain hacks I follow is, “I’m going to commit to writing one line of code today.” It’s a very small commitment and my brain doesn’t feel scared by it. Some days I really only write one or two lines of code and I call it a day. But on most days, once I “break the barrier” of learning, then I can go for at least 2 hours and build something awesome.
Being mindful of your energy on bad days might mean instead of active building that you’re watching and consuming educational content since that requires less energy to pursue.
The key thing here is do something every single day to get further in your career!
Learning Principle 2: Don’t learn in a vacuum
Learning data engineering by yourself in a corner is a losing game. You’ll find you have much more motivation if you learn in a group of other people. You can bounce ideas off them and they can help speed up your learning game by not only keeping your more consistent but by sharing their mistakes too!
College is great at solving this problem by putting you in classes with other students who have similar goals to you. As a self-learner, you need to seek these communities out.
Here are some communities to find other learners:
Learning Principle 3: Build stuff you’re proud of
When I started my career back in 2014, I built this crazy magic the gathering app. I was so happy with all the details. You should be treating your pipelines like works of art. Every detail of your portfolio should be awesome and spend time making it awesome! The more you invest in this area the more applied knowledge you’ll obtain and the further you’ll advance your career. You get the side benefit of being able to show something cool off to recruiters as well!
Don’t just do ML projects with the Titanic or iris datasets. Those are boring and nobody cares! Your portfolio project should be difficult to build and that difficulty is where the value is found!
Learning Principle 4: Go for many walks
Don’t just sit hunched over for 8 hours a day trying to smash data engineering knowledge into your brain. Every hour, you should be going for a short 10-15 minute walk. This gives your brain a break from screen time and stimulates it to create more connections than just sitting there.
Once I gave up my marathon coding sessions for 45 minute ones broken up by 15 minute walks, I saw my learning trajectory double or triple!
Learning Principle 5: Actually talk with people
When you’re at a party, try talking with someone about things and getting to know them. Learning how to be personable and understanding is critical for growing as an engineering leader over the long run! Practicing soft skills when the stakes are low make you much better at implementing them when the stakes are higher!
I make a point to have at least a 1 minute conversation everyday with someone I don’t know. Whether that be at a cafe ordering coffee, in an elevator, or wherever you might bump into strangers. You’ll find that putting yourself outside your comfort zone on a daily basis will make talking with people more natural!
Hard skills are what get you to senior engineer. Stuff like this is how you grow further!
Learning Principle 6: Hydrate and sleep
Thinking about the actual wiring of your brain allows you to optimize the physical aspects of it too not just the intellectual. Drink plenty of water every day to allow the electricity in your brain to build out. Sleep is also critical. If you have waste in your brain from the day before and a bad night’s sleep, your learning journey will be slower and much more sluggish that day. Remember to QUIT LOOKING AT YOUR DAMN PHONE after 10 PM at night!
If you follow these 5 principles, you’ll find yourself learning faster and more effortlessly and be able to sustain the learning journey for the long run!
What other techniques do you use to learn better?
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These are really nice pieces of advice