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Get Into Data Engineering

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Henrique Santos
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15 views

Get Into Data Engineering

Uploaded by

Henrique Santos
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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In this video, we will listen to

several data professionals talk about how they got into the
field of data engineering. I started off as a DBA on
IBM Db2 RDBMS, and I particularly enjoyed solving
performance problems for both OLTP and OLAP
databases. As a DBA I got an opportunity to interact with web application
developers, ETL
developers, and business intelligence users, and business
users, and a few other groups within organizations. As our
business requirements used to evolve, our need to invest and
research other non-RDBMS tools and processes envolved as well.
For example, to solve, or to store our documents we invested in MongoDB. And then
for our
24x7 365 days availability, highly
available application, we started exploring Cassandra.
And for our analytical database we started
exploring Hadoop and laid out a standalone
cluster and did POC on it. So all of a sudden, after
exploring all these technologies and start working on some of
them, I'm a data engineer now, not a DBA anymore. So I have a
somewhat unusual way of getting into data engineering. I think
of the two usual ways of getting into data engineering is either
starting out in system administration and moving into a
data profession or starting out in development and moving into a
data profession. But personally I graduated college. And I graduated college, and
when I did, I got a job at IBM. My goal on my resume at that
point was to be a DBA. I had a very targeted goal to get into a
data profession and I was able to get into that data profession
immediately. Within two years I could call myself a competent
DBA. Before that, I could call myself a DBA, but maybe a
beginner, and so it's a little bit of an unusual way that I got
there. I think that might be a little bit more common these
days. I think there are more opportunities to go directly there. But there are
certain
fields in technology that often come with expertise from other
fields. One of those is data. Another one of those is often
DevOps where you're coming in with either systems operation
experience or development experience, or both. There are
several fields like that, and I think data is one of them. Data
can benefit from either of those, because if you know some
of the tenants of systems administration and how to deal
with storage and the impact of network time and all of those
details, that can be very useful. If, on the other hand,
you know how developers deal with data and what they need out
of data, or what data scientists need out of data. All of those
are very valid areas to come into data engineering from. But
it's absolutely an area you can start from scratch. The main
thing you're looking for if you're starting from a college
degree or if you're starting from no college degree, you're
going to need a basic understanding of information
technology, and you're going to need a mentor to help you
kind of find the way. If you can find a mentor that's going to
make things a lot more easy because it can help you know
where what areas to focus in and what areas to kind of ignore.
There are an amazing number of resources out on the web these
days to help you. I could go on for half a day just listing some
of those sites you can go to and get more information. There are
online degrees you can work towards, both undergraduate and
graduate level. There's so many opportunities to move in that
direction these days that it's just amazing. So my beginnings
in this field go back to doing some simple data entry work as a student. And that's
what got me
interested in working with data and understanding its power. Although I have a
degree in
computer engineering, that alone did not get me the job of a data engineer. At that
time, we do not have online courses,
so I bought some books and learned how to work with databases. And
more importantly, I applied what I learned from these books by
creating database applications and then doing some volunteer
work and some freelance work. So these skills and experience of
doing real work with databases is what really helped me get a
internship. And then after that I mostly learned new
technologies on the job with occasional training
classes. And nowadays I mostly learn
about data technology, the new stuff that comes out, by
watching YouTube videos and taking online courses. It is a interesting journey.
After graduating from college,
I thought science and geography in the middle school for two
years. And then I spent three years doing marketing and
recruiting in non-profits, in education nonprofits. After that
I went to Graduate School to study non-profit management and
information systems. And it was in the grad school I got
interested in data. So after graduation I joined
education non-profits in Boston and became a business
intelligence analyst there. It was my first data related
full-time job. The learning curve for me was steep, but I really
enjoyed it after working there for one half year, and though I was
still passionate about education, I started to think about
maybe doing something differently outside of the
nonprofit sector. Yeah, at that time I had worked in
non-profits for almost 7 years. So I started to look for opportunities in education
technology companies. I applied for a data scientist position at Coursera but I got
rejected very soon. Luckily, the thing at the time
was also looking for data engineering role and they found
that my background might be a potential fit. So they reach out
to me and asked me whether I was interested in that position. To be honest, at that
time data
engineering was new to me. I didn't even know what's
different between data engineering and business
intelligence analyst, and the difference between
engineering and data scientists. But anyway, I
took the opportunity and started the interview
process with the team and luckily I got the job. So in the fall 2018 I moved from
Boston to the Bay Area and started my journey in data
engineering at Coursera.

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