I worked on Data Engineering, Data Analytics, ML Engineering, MLOps, Agentic AI, and Frontend in the last 2 months.
Hereās what I learned in each area:
1. Data Engineering:
- Most important and evergreen role as data is the new crude oil.
- Itās more about designing orchestration flows than tools.
- Understand OLAP vs OLTP: it simplifies everything.
- Cover edge cases before optimizing.
- Data pipelines are hardest to debug, failures can take hours to surface.
- Batching and sharding are core principles.
- Vibe-coding works for syntax but you need deep pipeline knowledge.
2. Data Analytics:
- Use Polars instead of Pandas.
- Check nulls, skewness, outliers, value counts, basic stats.
- Segment data to show business behavior across groups.
- Use AI heavily to write code and create plots.
- Feed plots and stats to AI to generate reports.
- Automation becomes very easy with AI.
3. Machine Learning:
- Feature engineering is the most important part.
- Build models from a business perspective, not just ML metrics (which can be improved later).
- Start with simple models; if performance is decent, move to production.
- Monitor training closely.
- Automate inference logic and FastAPI endpoints with AI.
4. MLOps:
- More about system design and business/UI needs than tools.
- Docker, FastAPI, MLflow, and Redis are mandatory.
- AI writes modular code well but can miss loop logic and focus on edge cases like in data engineering.
- Kubernetes and AWS take real learning; vibe-coding confuses debugging.
- Terraform is your friend for shipping entire ML systems to any cloud, learn it now.
5. Agentic AI:
- Prefer orchestration tools like LangGraph and CrewAI.
- Use LangChain only for sub-modules.
- One vector DB, one LLM, and one embedding model are enough for any prototype.
- System design is critical you canāt build good agents without understanding UI and technical flow.
- Observability is essential to evaluate agent outputs.
- Coding is easy with AI.
6. Frontend:
- Just use AI. Itās already dead otherwise.
Iām planning my next big project on distributed LLMs. Stay tuned! Youāll love it.