To stand out of the crowd, I have to take the initiative to work beyond my syllabus scope and pick up new skills. With thorough consideration and after mulling over my career roadmap, the skills that I can acquire from Meta programme are in line with my plan.
Meta Database Engineer Professional Certificate is the programme that I have take up, with a diverse array of modules under the certificate:
• Course 1: Introduction to Databases, est: 27 hours
•Course 2: Version Control, est: 27 hours
•Course 3: Database Structures and Management with MySQL, 32 hours
•Course 4:Advanced MySQL Topics, 18 hours
•Course 5:Programming in Python, 44 hours
• Course 6: Database Clients, 40 hours
Course 7: Advanced Data Modeling, 18 hours
•Course 8: Database Engineer Capstone, 18 hours
In module 1, possible career roles, basics of databases, and basic structure of databases will be covered. Hopefully, it will be beneficial to me and aid me in getting one step closer to my goal by equipping me with job ready skills while in the meantime earning the credential from Meta.
it is exciting in knowing that by the end of the project, you will be able to create a relational function database, designed and developed using the best practice architecture to showcase as part of your portfolio during your job search.
lecture 1
The digital space is a world of connection, and opportunity. To take this moment for example, the web has made it possible for you to enroll in this program where you learn from the personal stories of developers at Mehta. By the time you have completed this Professional Certificate, you can become a creator of digital experiences. Connection is evolving and so are you. You might not have a background in tech at all, and that's okay. Even if you have no experience, this program can get you a job ready within a single year. So how can this Professional Certificate prepare you for a job at an organization like Mehta? The Database Engineer of professional certificate, will help you build job-ready skills for database engineering role, while earning a credential from Mehta. From Mehta engineers, you will learn about how they collaborate to create and test high performance databases. You will also discuss interesting topics with other aspiring database engineers. Complete a range of coding exercises to improve your skills. It's important to complete all the courses in this certificate in order, as each course will build on your skills. Although we have a recommended schedule for each course, the program is entirely self-paced, which means your time is your own to manage. As you make your way through the courses in this certificate. You'll learn how to model and structure a database according to best practice, and create, manage, and manipulate data using SQL, one of the most widely used languages for working with databases. You'll also learn how to use the Django web framework, to connect the front end of a web application to your database. For your final project, you will create a functional relational database designed and developed with best-practice architecture to showcase as part of your portfolio during your job search. You'll also be ready to collaborate with other developers, as you will have learned to use Git and GitHub for version control. In the final course, you will prepare for the coding interview. You will practice your interview skills, refine your resume, and tackle some common coding challenges that typically form part of technical job interviews. Once you complete the program, you'll get access to the Mehta career programs job board. A job search platform that connects you with over 200 employers who've committed to sourcing talent through Mehta's certificate programs. Who knows where you will end up, whatever the future of connection looks like, you will part of its creation. Let's get started.
lecture 2
Hello and welcome to this course in database engineering. Almost everyone has used the database. More likely, information about us is probably present in many databases all over the world. But who understands what a database is, and how important database engineering is to global industry, governments, and organizations? A very straightforward description of a database is that it is a form of electronic storage in which data is held. Of course, that explanation does not even come close to explaining the impact of database technology. To give an idea of databases in a real-world context, let's briefly describe some typical use cases. For example, your bank uses a database to store data for customers, bank accounts, and transactions. A hospital stores patient data, staff data, laboratory data, and more. An online store retains your profile information along with your shopping history and accounting transactions. Many of these services have access to a diverse range of data. They collect and store other items such as your location, how long you spend on their platform, and friends you connected with, alongside many more facts. Such online services and social media platforms generate enormous amounts of data due to their large user base and constant user activity. With the Internet of things or IoT, many extra devices are now connected to the Internet. These continual streams of data have led to a revolution in database technology to accommodate the volume, variety, and complexity of what has become known as big data. Whatever the source of the data, a database will typically carry out the following actions, all of which a database engineer must be familiar with. Store the data, form connections or relationships between segmented areas of the data, filter the data to show relevant records, search data to return matching records, and have functions to allow the data to be updated, changed, and deleted as required. Don't worry if you don't fully understand all these terms. For now, you're just receiving a brief introduction to databases and data. During the course, you'll explore these concepts in more detail alongside the many other tasks that form the duties of a database engineer. You'll learn about the concepts of data and databases, how data is related in a database, and different database structures and their uses, how to perform, create, read, update, and delete operations, how to use SQL operators to sort and filter data, what database normalization is, and how to normalize a database. You'll get to build a fully operational database and you will also install and set up software called XAMPP on your computer to help progress your local and remote database learning. You're not expected to be a database engineer just now. There are many videos in your course that will gradually guide you toward that goal. Watch, pause, rewind, and rewatch the videos until you're confident in your skills. Then consolidate your knowledge by consulting the course readings and put your skills into practice during the course exercises. Along the way, you'll encounter several knowledge quizzes where you can self-check your progress, and you're not alone in considering a career as a database engineer, which is why you'll also work with course discussion prompts that enable you to connect with your classmates. It's a great way to share knowledge, discuss difficulties, and make new friends. To be successful in this course, it is helpful to commit to a regular and disciplined approach to learning. You need to be serious about your study and if possible, map the study schedule with dates and times that you can devote to attending the course. It's an online self-paced course, but it does help to think of your study in terms of regular attendance in a learning institute. In summary, this course provides you with a complete introduction to databases, and it's part of a program of courses that lead you toward a career in database engineering.
lecture 3
I really like this idea that in the end we're all solving human problems through technology. As a software engineer, my role is not to simply develop technological solutions, they need to have this human outcome.
Play video starting at ::17 and follow transcript0:17
I'm Daniel Bloomfield Ramagem, I'm a software engineer for Meta. I joined the company in 2017 and I work out of our Washington DC office. I immediately think of my mother's recipe book, which is a spiral notebook. She keeps her recipes in a spiral notebook, every page of the number, and she keeps an index at the beginning of that note books so she can easily find the recipe. Well, that's a database. My mom is a database engineer. Perhaps she is not an engineer, but certainly she relies and has created her databases. I like that fun example because it shows the range of things that are possible once you store data in a structured way that is can be easily retrieved, and so it's the recipe book, but it's also the picture I just shared on Facebook that now my friends get to see anywhere they are in the world so quickly. All that is powered by a lot of infrastructure, databases at the core. I think data is at the heart of every application. Learning to create an effective data layer that can provide the user with quick responses, accurate responses, and results is really critical. As a Database Engineer in particular, I think you are involved in such a critical component of building applications and you have such a large influence and everything else that follows from the data. That includes the user interface, it includes the clients, the APIs, all of that gets influenced by how the data layer gets modeled, stored, and all the characteristics of being able to retrieve that data effectively and making it the consumption of that information easy for the rest of the tech stack. We have a really large influence and I hope you walk away knowing that you have this very large influence on the development of applications. Technical skills I use on a daily basis. Certainly, I code. When I say code, I mean, normally I program using the standard programming languages for web. But I also work in the database space by creating the pipelines that produce, that extract, transform, and load a lot of the data that makes its way into the applications that we develop. The soft skills I use on a daily basis certainly include a lot of communication and organization. It's easy to come out of school and you're so excited at the coding, the technical skills you've learned, and those are obviously very important. But I thought code was king. I'm here to program, and I expect people to understand the output of what I'm making. I learned that that is insufficient and I saw great examples of people who were doing great technically, but they were excelling furthermore on just being able to explain what they were doing, not only to the team internally, but to the people who are going to maybe use those features in the toolset. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Particularly think we've database development, it's easy to over-complicate solutions, especially when you're doing data modeling and data storage, you want to cover every possible variation of data, every different use case, edge case for using that data. That can lead you down the path of creating very complex data schemas that become hard to maintain, can be not well performance. You need to iterate on your work. For databases, I would say try to focus on the here and now needs of data, be specially mindful of these perceived needs for massive data scalability, which may again lead to over-complicate your solution when in fact you might need something much smaller scale, at least the kickoff and get better understanding of what the feature and the data requirements truly are. Start small, iterate frequently, write more often. I know usually when you think of engineers and database programmers, you think of the output of your work is the program if the code is the SQL queries. Yes, it is. But that alone I think is insufficient. Complement that with writing. Now, what are you going to write about? Well, certainly there's documentation that goes along with your code. I have a good colleague in Meta that always tells me when I said I'm done with something, he looks at me and says, are you done done? I said the first time he said, yes, I'm done. He followed up with, is our documentation ready? Is your co-check in the right places? Is the wiki page updated? Did you write a post about this? He emphasized the importance of code is the 80 percent, 20 percent is that additional communication that's needed. I would say, write more often. Don't be afraid to write imperfectly, write something, put something out there, whether it's sharing the status of something that you're doing, whether it's just enhancing documentation for something that you're working on, get into the habit of writing more often. Try to take what you're learning and connect it to something practical that you can see a use for. Whether it's learning about databases and thinking about a recipe book that your mother or father has in a spiral notebook, or maybe baseball cards that you tracked as a child, or comic books that do tracked as a child. Try to think of ways to apply what you're learning technically to these real-life problems. They can be small problems, like finding recipes at the right time, but they can be of course, bigger, more, perhaps interesting problems around just technical and digital communication between people.