After a while of debating on it, I have decided to create a blog. My idea is ot make it a compendium of things I have learend over the years, on my self-learning pursuit of becoming a better Engineer - focusing on technical and career development topics. I might eventually delve into other areas of study, depending on how I feel…
Who am I?
A little more in depth intro than what you will find in the “About” section - I am Jose and I am originally from Venezuela 🇻🇪 moved to the US for undergratdaute school, majoring in Mecahnical Engineering. I figured since I had no clue what I wanted to do after school, ME would be a good generalist discipline to study because of the breadth of the curriculum.
I took an introduction to Computer Science course as part of my reqs - basically an introduction to a popular language for scientists and engineers called MATLAB
Afterwards, with a few free hours one semester, I decided to enroll in an additional course, Intro to Python. Probably one of the best decisions I have made to this day. Here I really discovered my interest for coding.
I was also doing material science research for my department’s Engineering Blast and Impact Dynamics lab. For those interested, we were conducting testing on a variety of polymers under high stress-strain conditions using one of the few Split-Hopkinson pressure bar setups in the country.
This was my first introduciton to in-depth data anlysis - we were using strain gauge readings to determine the mechanical proeprties of novel composite materials. Pretty cool, co-authored a few scientific papers with the team - some of the coolest friends I have.
On to Data Engineering
After school I decided to pursue a Data Analyst position with the company I interned for during my junior year. I was worked at a distribtuion center for a very popular e-commerce business, using all kinds of data regarding inventory, order fullfilment, headcounts, etc. I worked on tons of reporting, data visualizations, basical modeling and honestly pretty advanced SQL queries. My team here was made up by a bunch of geniuses, and with me being hungry for learning, it was the perfect environment.
Looking for more technical challenges I moved to a Data Engineer position with an analytics team, and my growth was exponential from that point. I was now working with data at a very large scale - so I picked up experience in distributed processing frameworks like Spark. As I gathered more experience I was then involved in more system architecture projects, where I was designing systems that our team would use to generate data for downstream teams/applications. This involves batch and streaming pipelines, as well as multiple kinds of reports and viz apps.
I was also given a driver seat in my team’s migration from on-prem resources to Google Cloud Platform - this was another multiplier for my growth. I have been able to learn not only the different cloud services, but also how to desing and implement systems that integrate them together. Also been able to pick up expreience with infrastructure management with IaaC and CICD
TLDR
I have discovered that I love learning, and have a knack for making things simple to understand - that’s what helps me learn them 😆. I also love taking notes, so figured I shared what I learn with others and see if it is helpful. Give back to the community that I have learned so much from! Hope you find something useful out of my notes. Thanks for being here.
– Jose