One of my favourite blogs on the internet is Simon Willison's Weblog. I recently read this post of his about link blogging and love the idea. I occasionally post longer-form articles or essays on my blog, but usually only one or two per month, and I have a totally chaotic and unorganized web of ways to keep track of other interesting things I'm learning about or doing, but a lot of them are things I would love to share or connect with other people about.

I think his style of blogging is a great fit for the ways I use the internet and keep track of notes. I'm already working on refreshing my website (again), and I think this way of thinking about what to publish and how will really work for me. I'm still enjoying the experience of writing in Obsidian, and I find the built-in daily notes functionality makes it really easy to keep things organized. Now I just have to turn all the content into a website :) I'd like to also eventually migrate all of my various prior attempts at blogging, at least on technical topics, to this system so it's all in one place.

I know reddit is a real mixed bag, but I often find good information there. It seems like it's one of the last remaining places on the internet that's not dominated by SEO-optimized or AI-generated hooey. I started the Coursera course associated with the AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate exam and was looking for recommendations for more learning resources when I came across this. I haven't started it yet so I'm not sure how good it is, but in the past I've had a great time learning a lot from these types of community-made resources. I'm looking forward to checking it out.

It's also the first time I've ever heard of the DataTalksClub. I don't know anything about it but it's github profile makes it seem like type of online community I absolute love. I am super passionate about creating free learning resources for technologies I'm interested in and really admire people who have had success doing that in their own niches. I'm excited to join this community and see what happens!

This is a great book that appears to mirror much of the content from the Fundamentals of Data Engineering book by Joe Reis and Matt Housley. I'm finding it really satisfying this week digging more into the distinctions between data engineering, data science, data analysis, software engineering, and everything in between. I started out in very standard software development roles, building rails apps for various companies. My roles over the last few years have been decidedly not typical web development ones, but I'm never quite sure how exactly to explain what I do best. I feel like I'm finally on to something with all of this data engineering stuff.