Advance Your Databricks Data Engineering Career

3,000+ engineers level up weekly through hands-on guides, interview prep, and production patterns.

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Follow for weekly guides, deep dives, and career tips.

LinkedIn 3 posts/week on Databricks career growth Substack Weekly deep dives & premium guides GitHub Hands-on labs & open-source projects Email Collaborations & training inquiries

Learning Paths

Step-by-step roadmaps from junior to senior. Curated courses, tutorials, and projects organized by skill level.

Become a Junior Databricks Data Engineer Ingestion patterns, jobs, orchestration, data quality, Associate prep. Become a Mid Databricks Data Engineer Medallion design, streaming, optimization, governance, Pro cert readiness.

Certification Prep

Pass Databricks exams faster. Study guides, practice strategies, and resources organized by exam objectives.

Lakehouse Fundamentals Prep for the Lakehouse Fundamentals accreditation. Data Engineer Associate Prep path, official courses, and practice exams. Data Engineer Professional Advanced prep with optimization and best practices. Spark Developer (PySpark) Developer-focused prep for the PySpark certification.

Hands-On Labs

Fork ready-to-run GitHub repos and practice DLT pipelines, optimization techniques, and certification prep — all on Databricks Free Edition.

Delta Lake Optimization Techniques Baseline a query, apply six optimizations, and compare files scanned, bytes processed, and runtime. DLT Apparel Streaming Pipeline Build a Delta Live Tables streaming pipeline using a synthetic data generator to mimic real-time events. PySpark Certification Zenith Hands-on PySpark exercises aligned to certification objectives; run on Free Edition. Data Engineer Associate Cert Prep Exam-aligned labs and checklists covering Delta Lake, Spark SQL, streaming, and ingestion patterns.

Newsletter

Deep dives, playbooks, and senior-level thinking — delivered weekly on Substack.

Interview Like Seniors Proven frameworks, Databricks-specific questions, and real answers that land offers. Execute Like Seniors Production-grade patterns for pipelines, optimization, and data quality. Think Like Seniors Decision-making, system design, and the mindset shifts that earn promotions.

Quick Reference Cheatsheets

Copy-paste-ready references for the commands and patterns you use daily. The 80/20 that keeps you moving fast.

dbutils Filesystem, secrets, notebooks, widgets, libraries, jobs. PySpark Data Manipulation Diagnostics, cleaning, transformations, aggregations, windows, joins. Delta Lake Maintenance Safe DDL, schema evolution, housekeeping, time travel, CDF, monitoring, cleanup. Delta Lake Optimization OPTIMIZE, Z-ORDER, Liquid Clustering, partitioning, VACUUM, and health checks. Unity Catalog Admin & Security Catalog/schema setup, grants, external locations, row/column security, SPNs, auditing. Soda Core Data quality checks, scans, metrics and monitoring for pipelines. PySpark Configuration spark.conf settings for performance, memory, SQL, Delta, Photon.

Weekly Databricks Guides & Deep Dives

Tens of actionable posts published weekly — optimization playbooks, interview deep dives, troubleshooting runbooks, and system design walkthroughs.

Get practical guides delivered to your inbox covering:

  • ✓ Step-by-step playbooks — Cluster optimization, Delta Lake tuning, and cost reduction strategies
  • ✓ Interview deep dives — "Killer" questions on Spark internals, Delta transactions, and system design
  • ✓ Decision guides & checklists — When to use partitioning vs. clustering, ingestion patterns, SCD strategies
  • ✓ Runbooks & troubleshooting — Fix data skew, slow queries, and OOM errors using Spark UI
  • ✓ Code snippets & cheat sheets — PySpark transformations, dbutils commands, data cleaning patterns
  • ✓ Junior vs. Senior comparisons — Mindset shifts and architectural thinking that separate levels
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