Why Apache Kafka?

As a data engineer, you should not be trying to convince your colleagues that everything can be a scheduled batch job. It's time to learn how to building streaming data pipelines. For many data engineers, Apache Kafka is the go to platform for enabling real-time data pipelines. Let's quickly cover why and how to get started.

Top Traits of a Data Engineer

Data engineer roles vary but some core traits stand out for any data engineer. If you missed it, check out my first posts in this series on What is a Data Engineer? and Data Engineer Skills for Success. Let's finish off this series with the traits I see as most critical for success as a data engineer.

Data Engineer Skills for Success

Data engineers job descriptions vary significantly as they are asked to work on many different projects. Yet, there are categories of skills that are consistently desired in a data engineer and serve as a foundation for learning new technologies. Here are the skills I see as most critical for success as a data engineer.

Journey of a Data Engineer: From BI Developer to Data Engineer

This is part 2 of my Journey of a Data Engineer series which all started from the question “What’s the best path to be a great data engineer?” Check out Part…

Data Lake Introduction

Hearing a lot of mention of Data Lakes but still not sure what that means or why anyone cares? This video will cover a brief introduction to what a Data Lake is and why so many organizations are adding them to their analytics ecosystem. To show what interacting with a data lake may look like for a typical data analyst, I included a demo of how you would use Spark SQL to query the data lake from Azure Databricks.

Apache Spark Introduction

This video we will quickly cover Apache Spark. The goal is to cover why use Spark and where it fits in the data ecosystem. If you want to just get…

Big Data Kickstart

Managing big data is critical for many organizations. Analytics can improve products and inform critical business decisions. Using data can provide distinct advantages, and it’s likely that an organization’s competitors are already leveraging their data.