How to Start on the Road to Mastery in SQL and BigQuery
One developer’s journey into the land of Data Engineering
Often we are afraid to face any challenge or failure, and because of this, we either leave it halfway done or don’t even dare to start it in the first place.
Today, I’ll share my journey so that you can relate to it and learn something to move forward in your career ladder or relieve your hesitation in learning anything.
In 2019, Mindvalley allowed me to work on Google BigQuery as a Data Engineer. I was completely new to the cloud environment. Even though I had tons of experience writing complex SQL and handling database production environments smoothly, I was afraid to execute queries on the cloud premise. Every time I had to write and execute some queries, I was always cost-conscious, thinking about query performance, and so on. I was trying to write optimized queries based on my previous experience. In general, that’s not a bad thing, but it’s always best for engineers should first familiarize themselves with the environment and then think about the advanced techniques.
One day I gave thought to myself, what is it that’s stopping me from moving forward? 🤔 And then I realized my whole journey, and everything was crystal clear to me. And for this experience, I couldn’t be grateful enough to each Mindvalley member, as well as my teachers who contributed to my growth.
I’ve seen people who don’t feel confident while writing SQL queries or any program. I kept digging into analyzing what those stepping stones can either help reach the peak or feel less confident in anything they do. It’s a lifelong journey: learning never ends — at least, I think this way. These are some of the limiting beliefs that I analyzed after meeting some developers:
We face challenges, and we give up.
We are afraid to start something new.
We compare ourselves with others.
We hurry to reach our destinations on the career ladder.
We expect a lot from ourselves and the same expectations we have from our written programs/queries😄 .
We don’t apprehend that we are competing with ourselves.
We don’t try to understand the problem.
Few other technical points that pull down a developer to move forward:
Don’t understand the business strategy/ workflow properly.
Don’t give a thought about the problem statement that we are trying to achieve/ solve and directly jump onto getting the solution.
Don’t focus on basic things and rush to gain advanced knowledge first.
And this is not the complete list; I’ll keep talking about it in my upcoming articles. Also, even if you haven’t achieved mastery in any field, don’t be afraid to help others. You’ll learn a lot in that process.
Whenever I would think about writing this article, one old TV advertisement would pop into my head. I want to share it with you as it did leave valuable learnings in my life and shifted my whole perspective of how I look at things.
In short, it means “No pain — no gain” 💪.
One thing that you can take away today is “Don’t be afraid to learn anything. Even if you face challenges or obstacles, keep going”. 🚶♀🚶
And yeah!! You heard me right; I’ll be coming up with series of articles that includes new learnings from each BigQuery Error that I faced myself in the last two years, along with the solutions and techniques that I applied to solve those errors. Stay tuned!!!
Lastly, I couldn’t end this without expressing my heartfelt gratitude to these amazing people from Mindvalley: Soliman ElSaber, Mohamed Diab, Ana Pina, Din Yahya, TS Lim, Edham Arief Dawillah, Natalia Shcheglova, and Alsu Kashapova. 🤗 They are behind this successful journey of mine. If you cross your path with them anywhere in the world, don’t be afraid to learn from these geniuses' minds🤝.
