Ways To Enhance Your Technical Knowledge

With the technology world moving so fast it is now very challenging to keep up with all new technologies out there. It becomes a pain to find and apply new technologies when you don’t have sufficient knowledge. There are few different ways that I follow to keep upto date with technologies that are in my domain, that is, Data Engineering, but it applies to all technical engineering roles.

The following approaches are interrelated to each other.

Online Courses

Online courses are one of the ways to improve your existing skills or to learn new technologies. Back in the day when I was in college, this was my favorite approach to learn new stuff. I did big data, Scala and machine learning courses online through websites like Coursera, Udacity and Edx. These platforms are great for theoretical concepts and also require commitment, it is like a full course you do in college.

GitHub

Following open source Github repos is another way, it gives you an opportunity to understand and apply those tools in your work. Becoming an early adopter also provides a good opportunity to contribute because once the project is matured it’s hard to contribute. As an example: I follow Apache Spark.

Slack

Open source projects usually have Slack Workspaces, it also provides a great way to keep upto date with your favorite tool. Not only that, it also gives easy access to interact with the community. One of my Slack includes the Apache Airflow.

Medium

Medium blogs are one of the coolest or newest ways in the market to increase your domain knowledge. Medium blogs are written by industry professionals, they give insights to their approach in solving a problem, for example, designing a data pipeline, architecting a big data platform. I follow a lot of companies including Netflix.

YouTube

If you are a fan of video content then this is for you. All the top conferences and workshops are available on Youtube. I usually get a lot of invites via email or LinkedIn, even if you don't, you can still watch it once available for the public. The engineers are the one who talk about their product, the underlying approaches and technologies. A great example would be Amundsen (Thanks to my teammate Daniel Pires for introducing this!).

Documentation

Another good place is the official documentation, it could be at GitHub or the official website, usually linked with each other. The official website that provides documentation gives easy access to the codebase and relevant definitions, usually searchable. So instead of looking into repos, you can just search for what you need. See Airflow Docs.

Follow Top Engineers

Start following Top Engineers on Medium, Github or Social Channels. To find them, the easiest is to checkout the contributions on the project that you have been following, or find through LinkedIn.