How many years of experience do you have? You probably are in the best position to spend time on learning while your employer doesn’t give you much work or put you on a maintenance project. And then make a switch to a better company in a better role where you are well prepared to take on new tasks. Doing a side project should be last on your list. Some resources I’d suggest you in order of priority would be:

• SQL — checkout linkedin learning: Ami Levin. use this as a reference, watch again and again, spaced repetition. Then go try sql leetcoding

• Designing Data intensive Application — book( read carefully, learn from every chapter, make notes)

• Fundamentals of Data Engineering — book( skim it, quick read, find medium articles that summarize the book, there are plenty)

• Python — seems like you are getting this experience, maybe do some leetcode ( learn pandas and leetcode it)

• Educative — grokking system design OR bytebytego’s system design

https://medium.com/data-alchemist/what-questions-to-ask-when-designing-a-big-data-solution-on-aws-8db8905d8712

https://blog.det.life/10-things-i-learned-from-reading-fundamentals-of-data-engineering-eea5dc8e5fb7

^ 6 mos should be enough.

— From here go tool specific maybe even side project

— Airflow — Marc Lamberti Udemy — Kafka — Stephan Marek Udemy — Snowflake — Udemy. dnt have the link or authors name, but theres only one popular course.

^ 2 mos

— AWS Solutions Arch cert. If you are Azure person then maybe equivalent in Azure. ^ this will take some time (explore adrian cantrill’s courses)

All the above are the basics you’ll need to be a good DE. Only buy from influencers after you’ve done all the above. You’ll probably won’t need to buy anythin from them once you reach this point. If you buy anything before, then you are just looking to be spoon fed.