June 26, 2021

Lessons Learned From The Pipeline Data Engineering Academy

1 hour 11 minutes

Summary

Data Engineering is a broad and constantly evolving topic, which makes it difficult to teach in a concise and effective manner. Despite that, Daniel Molnar and Peter Fabian started the Pipeline Academy to do exactly that. In this episode they reflect on the lessons that they learned while teaching the first cohort of their bootcamp how to be effective data engineers. By focusing on the fundamentals, and making everyone write code, they were able to build confidence and impart the importance of context for their students.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management

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Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Daniel Molnar and Peter Fabian about the lessons that they learned from their first cohort at the Pipeline data engineering academy

Interview

Introduction

How did you get involved in the area of data management?

Can you start by sharing the curriculum and learning goals for the students?

How did you set a common baseline for all of the students to build from throughout the program?

What was your process for determining the structure of the tasks and the tooling used?

What were some of the topics/tools that the students had the most difficulty with?

What topics/tools were the easiest to grasp?

What are some difficulties that you encountered while trying to teach different concepts?

How did you deal with the tension of teaching the fundamentals while tying them to toolchains that hiring managers are looking for?

What are the successes that you had with this cohort and what changes are you making to your approach/curriculum to build on them?

What are some of the failures that you encountered and what lessons have you taken from them?

How did the pandemic impact your overall plan and execution of the initial cohort?

What were the skills that you focused on for interview preparation?

What level of ongoing support/engagement do you have with students once they complete the curriculum?

What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected solutions that you saw from your students?

What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working with your first cohort?

When is a bootcamp the wrong approach for skill development?

What do you have planned for the future of the Pipeline Academy?

Contact Info

Daniel

Website

@soobrosa on Twitter

Peter

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

Pipeline Academy

Blog

Scikit

Pandas

Urchin

Kafka

Three "C"s – Context, Confidence, and Code

Prefect

Podcast Episode

Great Expectations

Podcast Episode

Podcast.__init__ Episode

Docker

Kubernetes

Become a Data Engineer On A Shoestring

James Mickens

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

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By Tobias Macey

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