Programming Plan for 2023 - 16/04/2023

It is now the second quarter of the year. I started to realise that my tech stack knowledge is starting to plateau slowly and this made me think of what technologies should I start learning this year that could potentially help with improving my career.

I am following these criteria that I think will be important for my growth

• It should be relevant in the upcoming years
• It should strengthen my fundamentals
• It should be usable for my current work

These are the skills I chose:

Rust Language

It is a statically-typed programming language which will improve how I think on programming in general. This will keep me aware of each line of code that I will write which will generally improve code quality. Learning to think in types will also affect how I code in other languages. It is beneficial as I have not used a typed language in my career.

Memory management is also something important for developers to learn as well. Especially with web developers, we have not thought of types explicitly for a long time until Typescript came. I have used Python and Javascript which are both interpreted languages so having to learn how to manage types and memory allocation on compile time will be a challenge for me.

With the current big companies that are moving to Rust, rewriting their whole systems, it gives me hope that this language will be here to stay for a long time. They understood what Rust can provide and its value that they are willing to invest resources into it. Hopefully in the future, it will be the only language I would need for all types of development.

Data Engineering

I currently work as a data engineer in Melbourne, Australia. This is the first company where I worked as a Data Engineer. This allowed me to experiment with data pipelines and infrastructure. I am looking to learn more technologies related to it. I am now mainly looking to specialise in the following technologies – Task Orchestration, Data Pipelines, and Infrastructure.

Tech stack that I am looking at

• Apache Airflow
• Apache Spark
• Snowflake
• DBT
• Open Metadata

One of the main reasons I also wanted to improve this skill is that almost all companies right now are data companies and I think data engineering will be part of every data company’s toolkit having the skills to implement the engineering and policy of data would be really valuable in the future.

Business

As a Computer Science graduate, I wasn’t able to take business courses. Learning how businesses generally work would also be a valuable skill to learn. I am lucky to be in my current company since they are openly discussing how the business is going and I try to listen to how they make their decisions. It is a skill that I need to work on and my goal is to come to a point where I can understand how decisions are being made and how to implement it. I know that it would benefit me in the future as a leader.

I only limited it to these three things as I would like to be focused this year.

Thanks for reading!