I’ve been doing data engineering long enough, and I’ve always felt left out, incapable, and inferior.

The itch

The majority of the roles I have taken only made me stupider, and paired with an ever-growing impostor syndrome — you can imagine how that’s a recipe for disaster. Recently I saw a job offer for a senior data engineer: not only am I not qualified, but I had never even heard of the concepts in it. Talk about humbling.

A few years ago I read the most amazing article ever, in the best blog ever, and it changed how I think about learning technology. I had been convinced I was inferior — I’d even developed a mechanism to protect myself from failing: unfortunately, that mechanism was not trying.

Never again. This blog is for me and for every other person stuck in limbo — that state of dumbification, lack of purpose, and lack of direction.

The purpose is to create new, amazing things, and to develop curiosity.

So I’m taking the DataTalksClub Data Engineering Zoomcamp — a course aimed at people newer than me — and doing every piece of it honestly. No skipping homework. The dare is to be a beginner again on purpose.

AI helped me build this website, and I’ll be editing it as I go — sharing my progress through the course, blog ideas, etc.

How I’m pacing it

Fast track: 8 weeks, ~10–15 hours a week, one module per week, capstone after. The full plan and live progress live on the Roadmap.

For each module:

  1. Build it the course way. Do the homework, no shortcuts.
  2. Name what’s new. What changed since I learned this?
  3. Find the breaking point. Where does the toy version fall apart at scale?
  4. Teach it back. This write-up is the exam. If I can’t explain it plainly, I didn’t relearn it.

What “in public” means

Everything lands here: terse notes as reference, and a weekly write-up like this one as the narrative. Publishing forces a standard — vague understanding doesn’t survive contact with a blank page. If it helps one other person retracing these steps, even better.

Week 1 is containers and infrastructure as code. Let’s go back to the beginning.