6 very useful learning resources for data engineers
Whether you’re just starting out in the data industry or a grizzled veteran, it’s important to stay abreast of what’s going on and sharpen your skills every now and then.
Here are some excellent learning resources I’ve found over the years that helped educate and inspire me. Hopefully you find them useful.
1. TechWorld with Nana (https://www.youtube.com/c/TechWorldwithNana)
YouTube is generally an incredible source of knowledge, but I wanted to highlight Nana’s channel in particular.
While she caters more to the DevOps space, Nana has an unbelievable talent for explaining core concepts and helping you build knowledge quickly and thoroughly. She is single-handedly responsible for teaching me Docker and Kubernetes and I can highly recommend her tutorials on Git, Python and CI/CD.
AND because it’s on YouTube, it’s all free. No excuses not to have a look.
2. Medium (https://medium.com)
If you’re reading this, you’re already here! For people who are just passing through, Medium is an open publishing platform where anyone can write articles. The quality of the technology content on the platform is very high and their recommendation engine is incredible at finding content specific to your interests. If you can get into the habit of reading their daily digest email every morning, the articles will find you. I’m firmly in an echo chamber on data engineering, analytics and cloud — I’m sure there’s a lot more variety on there, but it very rarely finds its way to me.
3. The Modern Data Stack Repository (https://moderndatastack.xyz)
The Modern Data Stack LinkedIn page regularly re-posts the best data related articles/blog posts and their website is especially useful. moderndatastack.xyz lets you see how big company’s have architected their data platforms and all of the available software in a particular category. If you’re confused by a term, their definitions and explanations are second to none.
4. Chartr (https://chartr.co)
This one is more on the data visualisation side and appeals to anyone who enjoys data. The team publish visualisations and data related news stories every other day. A quick look at their website or Instagram page will have you intrigued. If you sign up for their free newsletter, you get more charts and stories. The content is consistently high and the visualisations can help spark the imagination.
5. The DataJoey blog! (https://datajoey.com)
(Shameless self plug — sorry)
We’re hoping to have a lot of useful content for data professionals and enthusiasts over the coming months, so stayed tuned to our website, Medium and LinkedIn pages.
Here are some of our recent medium articles:
My Top 5 Python Packages for 2023
SQL: From Fear To Love. A Data Scientist’s Journey
So you’re in charge of a data platform. 6 common sense things to consider.
If you’re curious about what DataJoey is, read our post here.
6. Stack Overflow (https://stackoverflow.com)
I couldn’t write this article without mentioning the undisputed champion. Anyone who has ever written a line of code will be all too familiar with Stack Overflow. Quite how they’ve managed to solve the question and answer search (in combination with Google) so effectively still boggles my mind.
Interesting fact: Joel Spolsky, the founder and CEO of Stack Overflow also led the Microsoft Excel team in the early 90s and founded the project management tool, Trello. He may well go down as one of the greatest contributors to human productivity in history.
Other tools I’ve heard good things about, but haven’t personally used:
- Substack (https://substack.com)
- Kaggle (https://kaggle.com)
- dev.to (https://dev.to/ )
The list again:
- TechWorld with Nana (https://www.youtube.com/c/TechWorldwithNana)
- Medium (https://medium.com)
- The Modern Data Stack Repository (https://moderndatastack.xyz)
- Chartr (https://chartr.co))
- The DataJoey blog! (https://datajoey.com)
- Stack Overflow (https://stackoverflow.com)
