I’m Simone, an aspiring Software Engineer. This website is my personal space, where I’ll be documenting my journey in the field of software engineering.
As of now, the content might be a bit unpredictable, but in the near future, I plan to share insights into my current studies, the courses I’m taking, and my progress in the field.
The overarching goal is to post monthly updates, reflecting on the achievements and challenges of the past month, and ensuring that I stay on track with the goals set in the previous month.
For a more in-depth understanding of who I am and my plans for this blog, I invite you to read this post. It provides a detailed exploration of my background, aspirations, and the vision I have for this space.
Currently, I am in the process of migrating content from my old blog, which started in January 2024, to this new platform as of June 2024. This involves transferring posts, reorganizing content, and ensuring that everything is up-to-date, so some content may temporarily be missing.
I have organized the content of this Garden into various topics and sections for easier navigation and a more focused exploration. Here are the main topics:
- Apache Spark: Since I would like to focus my career on Data Engineering, Apache Spark is one of the primary tool of this field, so I decided to dedicate a specific section on it. The goal is to fill this section especially with Apache Spark “batch-mode” notes. If I’ll have the opportunity to use the “streaming-mode” too, I’ll dedicate some notes on it.
- Blog: I post everything that isn’t technical learning notes.
- Courses & Playlists: it contains notes about YouTube playlists or Udemy courses or anything else that requires a specific folder. Among them, I want to cite the most important ones:
- Database System (by Andy Pavlo): this is a fantastic course (available freely on YouTube) taken by Andy Pavlo from Carnegie Mellon University. It’s a very long course, so along the time I’m trying to follow all the lessons and post here my notes. It’s not a “practical course”, in the sense that I’m not learning how to code or some specific tools, but it’s giving me a great consciousness about Databases, that is a tool we constantly use all the time as software engineers. If you want to know what’s happen under the hood when you use a database, I really suggest this course. Since I’m trying to get notes at best, I’m only at the 5th lesson at the time I’m writing.
- Data Engineering Bootcamp (by Zach Morris Wilson): # 6-week Data Engineering BootCamp freely available on YouTube by Zach Wilson. I’m following this bootcamp right now and it looks so interesting. There are both theoretical and practical lessons. As far as I know, Zach has worked in some FANGs for many years and gained a lot of experience, so maybe he can give us tips that are hard to find elsewhere.
- Understanding Python (by Jake Callahan): a playlist on basic-intermediate topics that I found on YouTube by chance. Jake is very clear in its explanation.
- Data Engineering: there will be playlists or single-article notes about data Engineering.
- Other: this section contains scattered notes I have about Docker, Git, and other topics I study in the future.
- Periodical Retrospective: I will regularly post recaps every 2-3 months, reflecting on my professional life, highlighting what went well, and identifying areas for improvement.
- Python: I will fill this section with notes on Python topics that I find interesting or useful to know about.
- Technical Books: I post notes I am taking from books I am reading. Note that these books aren’t meant to be read entirely. I’ll only take notes on the chapters that interest me the most, and especially those that are relevant to my work; so, don’t expect to find notes on all the chapters. At the time of writing, this section includes the following books:
- Fluent Python (by Luciano Ramalho): This book is an intermediate-advanced level Python book.
- Head First Design Pattern (by Eric Freeman & Elisabeth Robson): This book is an highly recommended book for Design Patterns. When the books need clarification or integration, I’ll use videos from Christopher Okhravi’s YouTube channel, which has a great playlist about design patterns: Design Pattern Playlist by Christopher Okhravi.
- Python Object-Oriented Programming (by Steven F.Lott & Dusty Phillips): This book dives into the various aspects of OOP in Python.
- Deciphering Data Architecture (by James Serra): this book focuses more on certain aspects of data engineering, especially explaining data architectures like Databases, Data Warehouses, Data Lakes, and Data Lakehouses. I hope it helps me better understand these concepts, as I only have a partial grasp of them.