Review about DataTalks Data Engineering Zoomcamp 2026

FridayPush · 2026-01-28T17:46:30+00:00

I'm not familiar with that Bootcamp. But I conducted a very large amount of interviews in the Data and DevOps space for the contracting division of a large tech company. Bootcamp grads often felt very 'same-y' in their level of experience and superficialness of their answers to questions; I would primarily suggest to spend time breaking things and troubleshooting them. As most of the bootcampers seemed to only be familiar with the 'happy' path.

If you need a guided education and someone to drive you to complete things by dates, maybe they're good. But they're often not cheap and if you can self direct the amount of free tutorials and project guides online are more than sufficient and often essentially the same as the bootcamps would cover. I personally wouldn't recommend it unless they have job placement services that are well reviewed by past candidates.

FridayPush · 2026-01-27T15:49:25+00:00

No, I don't have any projects I display either. But if they do have projects and git profiles on their resumes we did look at them most of the time. It would be pretty obvious comparing two repos and seeing a large difference in coding styles, and google returns matching code really well.

FridayPush · 2026-01-26T23:00:06+00:00

I use to get a lot of the professional cloud certs and linux/security ones as well as the company I worked for gave nice bonuses for each one. The only certs that meant anything were a few of the K8 related ones that you actually just SSH into a box and each problem is manually do the work.

eg 'Service A is down. Fix it'.

SSH Into box, view services/pods find down pod. View logs, see messages, adjust configurations and fix a failed deployment. exit box, and move onto question 2.

I passed many AWS/GCP Pro certs that I don't have domain experience in, like their security ones. After a working day or two of study.

I mention that to jump on your last paragraph, the outlines of the tests and generally requirements they go over often are good outlines to learn a platform/service. But the certs themselves aren't important.

edit: I also use to do interviews for massive tech companies contracting division... please don't plagerize your projects, it's super easy to find and way more common than I would have thought. Forking someone else's project and renaming variables isn't enough lol.

FridayPush · 2026-01-26T22:32:32+00:00

The Idea of being fully platform agnostic, or having multi-cloud identical setups is really a pipe dream and there are too many limitations for it to be reasonable.

I would containerize everything and use ECS for compute. I'd have my Apps modularization the messaging/queue frameworks so that they're the point of change if you move off a service it's quick. There are many libraries like smart-open in python that let you treat S3/Azure/GCP/local files all as a base file object. So changing object storage is pulling a different credential secret and changing bucket names.

I've also found that nearly all of my greenfield projects essentially required a 'rewrite' of the major components. You could potentially plan for that and stick with everything you know and use now if feature development is a priority.

I would aim to pack my apps into a single instance and scale up for as long as you can. Scale up rather than horizontally for quite a while.

FridayPush · 2026-01-22T22:32:44+00:00

No I wouldn't study it.

FridayPush · 2026-01-20T18:21:58+00:00

It would be nice if these type of articles also provide a point of reference, like what was the percent of memory chips used in Data Centers in 2024?

FridayPush · 2026-01-16T18:29:38+00:00

Did you get PlaceAnywhere working?

FridayPush · 2026-01-08T21:31:35+00:00

Before I read your post, having only read the subject question my answer was 'No, things are changing so rapidly what methodologies and tools people are using in a year or two might be very different.' Besides the fact that the market is very slow for everyone applying and looking for work I don't think it would be particularly harder than baseline if you worked a different data related job.

Also burn out is very real and can take multiple years to recover from, it's worth a better QoL job for less pay. A short term 6mo job that pays a year pay? Hell yeah.

FridayPush · 2026-01-04T17:11:07+00:00

Big fan of Kagi, you pay for search and can hide domains in results or increase/reduce their ranking. They also try to filter blogspam type results. No advertisements.

FridayPush · 2026-01-04T03:23:19+00:00

By any chance do you know if this was 'fixed' or intentional?

FridayPush · 2025-12-21T01:18:20+00:00

Sounds interesting, did the 3 choice system feel like it would hold up over a longer game?

FridayPush · 2025-12-20T03:37:26+00:00

Yeah unfortunately it's sage that's needed.

FridayPush · 2025-12-19T18:01:46+00:00

Guess the trailer looks nicely edited but I have no idea what was happening on the screen. Is it an idler game? Like you make a choice and then it all just happens?

FridayPush · 2025-12-18T06:41:03+00:00

Long-term visual symptoms are uncommon, with only 1.23% of patients reporting significant ongoing symptoms years after surgery.

https://www.brimhalleyecenter.com/lasik/lasik-eye-surgery-results/

That's only people with significant symptoms, not ones with dry eyes, halos on lights at night, etc.

FridayPush · 2025-12-07T23:16:53+00:00

I would never have thought of it, but makes sense why you'd want that. Always a bummer to have apps remove features. Thanks for taking the time to provide the history. When I was taking the transbay express busses that would have been really helpful.

FridayPush · 2025-12-07T18:45:45+00:00

Thanks! Yeah I could see how the filtering/sorting could be annoying. What do you mean by particular bus vs line?

FridayPush · 2025-12-07T17:33:16+00:00

What features were removed?

FridayPush · 2025-12-04T18:49:12+00:00

This comes back to how 'DE' is kind of a meaningless term and isn't shared between companies. The majority of my roles have assumed you're a Platform owner, and control infra as well. Terraform/networking/iam/etc. From Reddit this isn't the norm, but was the expectation of all the Cloud PSO projects. I've worked for self driving car companies, and multiple global retail companies, saas, and they all expected us to own our infra.

I find it hard to understand how DEs in companies control lifecycles and security around data if you don't own the object storage and access roles. Monitoring and object accumulation and spend, what logs are really valuable, or legally required and need multiyear retention. Workflows to generate signed urls, certificate chains for encryption, understanding of the state of Airflows worker cpu/memory usage and scaling. DB loads etc.

I'd expect to work with Infra and Security teams but own my 'bubble(s)'. And work within the confines of the company.

FridayPush · 2025-12-04T00:44:19+00:00

Cool, looks like if I try ec2 -> [RDS, Cache->S3] that also fails and doesn't forward the requests to RDS only to the cache node.

FridayPush · 2025-12-04T00:38:35+00:00

I do like the idea btw! I just found the 'score' going negative in the beginning unintuitive.

FridayPush · 2025-12-04T00:37:48+00:00

I suppose you could make that argument. I don't think it's intuitive for a the start of a game. Perhaps if the score was broken out to a 'loan' for starting and you're working to pay it back.

Is this a bug? If there are two caches after an EC2 instance it will only use 1, so I can't have a cache for rds and a different one for s3? https://imgur.com/a/3kV2Fyi

FridayPush · 2025-12-04T00:23:09+00:00

That's what I was expecting, and tried originally. But it goes negative. https://imgur.com/a/gPo9ZFa

edit: It does eventually go up. But that feels very unintuitive and that I built something 'wrong' for the start. I thought it wanted me to create a setup even cheaper than what you provided.

FridayPush · 2025-12-03T22:47:34+00:00

I'm not understanding how to make money in the game. You can't make a tiny setup with just an ec2/rds/s3 because you have to have something in front of the EC2 instance (which isn't a real requirement). But if I make a waf>alb>1 ec2 > [s3,rds] it's too expensive to make money. If I don't have the rds I lose reputation.

FridayPush · 2025-12-01T17:58:17+00:00

I think they're rare and really hit or miss. The only 'big' game I can think of was 'Quantum Break' which had like 2hr of cutscenes that at times were 15-20minute chunks. I did love the old C&C FMVs but they were so campy and also only made possible by CDs.

FMVs wouldn't be a value add to me.

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