Learning by Doing

The principle of learning can take many forms—through different media, structured steps, supportive environments, or any combination that makes the process enjoyable, fun, easy to understand, relaxed, and focused, thereby adding positive value. Learning by Doing is one such approach. Personally, I believe that mastering the fundamentals is essential, but when you’re a programmer or working in a highly technical field, hands‑on experience is crucial for transforming foundational theory into real‑world implementations.

I’ve found that creating projects—especially in data engineering—offers tremendous benefits. Working on a project motivates me to solve problems and discover new technologies, and I often find myself racing to finish it within a day or two. The thrill of problem solving and the excitement of learning something new have become addictive triggers for me.

Cost and Struggle

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Data engineering projects can sometimes costly for cloud services, computation, data samples, and more. You can mitigate these expenses by choosing open‑source tools or signing up for free trials on:

  • Cloud platform such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP), AWS, and Azure
  • Platform as a service like Databricks and Snowflake.

Personally as in my trials, GCP, Databricks, and Snowflake offer the most generous free‑trial credits and compute resources.

Finding the idea for a data engineering project can be tricky, especially if you want it to be valuable or unique. One effective strategy is to address real‑world company problems. You can learn what companies are tackling by attending their conferences—I used insights from the Tokopedia START Summit Extension 2022 to build a Product Cataloging project inspired by their team’s challenges. Alternatively, browsing job postings to see which tools and workflows companies use can be base ideas for your own projects.

Building a project closely related to the role you want can increase your chances of landing an interview, although it’s never a guarantee. Even if you don’t get invited, you’ll have a strong portfolio piece and gain valuable new skills. In this world, It’s rare having 100% certain—but boosting your odds, even by just 1%, can set you apart from the rest.