Folding Data #29

The Path to Analytics Engineering

Show me a company mildly invested in analytics that doesn't struggle with hiring data and analytics engineers. At the same time, I get lots of questions from people looking to get into the field with a non-tech background.

How does one start a career as an analytics engineer? Stories from the community tell us that there are many paths to it.

This time I'll leave the social and philosophical aspects of this job aside and focus on technicals:

There are dozens of multi-month online courses teaching "Data Engineering" and similar tracks. I'd recommend getting solid CS and coding fundamentals, and then using those to acquire applied skills such as building data pipelines with dbt.

How does one ramp up with CS without having to do 4 years as a CS major in college or attending expensive coding bootcamps? (most tend to focus on specific skills rather than building fundamental understanding). I think the best option is CS50, offered for free by Harvard online on the EDX platform. It assumes zero prior background in coding, builds fundamentals bit by bit with engaging lectures and fun homeworks. I took CS50 10 years ago and it changed my life – I wouldn't be writing to you today if not for what CS50 has taught me!

With CS50 under your belt, it may be time to dive into the specifics of the Analytics Engineering workflow.

co:rise and Analytics Engineers Club – started by experienced analytics engineers and leaders in the data community – teach applied skills required to effectively build data pipelines with modern tooling such as dbt and cloud warehouses.

Change your life – take CS50!

Tool of the week: Metarank

It's so inspiring to see how problems, such as ranking content that previously occupied some of the industry's best minds, are now being rapidly commoditized by awesome open-source projects, allowing those bright minds to focus on solving increasingly unique and high-leverage problems!

Metarank is a no-code platform for building ranking engines: product listings, articles, recommendations, search results – you name it.

Make my content personalized

My stuff: Datafold + dbt partnership & integration

We at Datafold are committed to advancing the field of Analytics Engineering. The official partnership and a 1-click integration with dbt Cloud now allow Analytics Engineers to supercharge their workflows. Analytics Engineers can see through their dbt pipelines with column-level lineage and deal with data quality in the pull request with data diff!

Supercharge my dbt workflow

Before You Go

Data Council Austin was a ton of fun, especially the happy hours. And if you didn't see me at the talks – I was busy promoting reliable change management to the masses:

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