It's been 6 years since I started working in data. I started with Excel in 2015, as a data intern, then started working with python in 2019 for Machine learning. In that time, I have picked up a wide range skills. This time period has seen me work with a wide variety of technical skills from statistics, analytics, sql and even software engineering and also a lot of tools from Python, Tableau, Alteryx, Powerbi etc.

Why Data Engineering?

From the above, it is quite obvious I have been around the data playground quite a bit and for a while. I have dabbled in the fields from analytics to machine learning etc, Some things however have stood out with me such as;

• I love the python language
• I love working with Data
• I love the technical aspect of working with data.

While I love what I am doing in the interim, in the long run, these are the things I will like to be working with, data engineering helps me to combine all the things I love, which is why I am making the transition, however because I love data visualisation, I intend to continue to work and improve on my data visualisation skills using tableau.

Another reason I am pivoting into data engineering is to streamline my career, I am a generalist. I have pretty much done whatever I wanted to in the past couple of years, while this is good, it has not really lent itself to a career growth.

A new Beginning?

I don't think so, more like a different beginning, another opportunity to relaunch myself and my career. For one, I am not starting from the beginning. I am starting from where I am, and I think I am in a pretty good place. My tech stack is not really changing, I hope to improve on my current stack and add a couple more, especially cloud computing.

But this new journey will see me doing things a lot more differently, I will be learning in the open, building a lot more, getting very hands on and documenting my journey.

Next Steps/Resources

So where will I be learning?. The Internet, of course, lol. But primarily I will be enrolling in the data Engineering track on Data Camp, and also on Udacity. Ideally I would love to enrol in the Udacity data engineering nano degree but it's a lot more than I can afford right now. Dataquest also has a good data engineering track I will hopefully check out along the line.

I will also be spending a lot of time on Tableau and storytelling resources in improve my skills and creating projects in that area.

Also watch this space, a very important part of this journey is working on this blog, so I will be sharing more technical and non technical content here.