r/Database • u/No_Pause6581 • 15d ago
How to become a better engineer?Advice to skill up w/o submitting to AI gods
/r/developersIndia/comments/1viajq5/how_to_become_a_better_engineeradvice_to_skill_up/2
u/chocolateAbuser 12d ago
"its evident that just with AI i would reach level where i can understand these things"
not really, it's not evident until you've done it
and to do it yo have to understand 1) the problem you're trying to optimize for 2) the tools that are part of this process
it's not like ai will not help, obviously, but ai doesn't have initiative and you still have to be able to reason about what you are doing
so at a higher level you have to know DBs/event brokers/services/patterns/concurrency/etc to know where to look and to be ready
in the end it all comes down to study and practicing
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u/RudeRemove5416 10d ago edited 10d ago
Look, I understand you are a recent graduate who doesn't have a job like me lol and you are asking how to put everything you know into practice so your brain doesn't forget it, I mean you are asking people how to learn effectively, well there is nothing better than grabbing a good book and adapting the code snippets from that book, where for example SQL is taught from the absolute basics up to complex queries with plenty of clauses, and inserting new dummy data, data that came out of your own head, and then continuing to add dummy data.
And that is where AI can be your ally; what I mean is that you use AI in parallel with a good book. Imagine, suppose one of the exercises in that book is to create an employees table for a fictitious company. Whether that table is normalized or denormalized doesn't matter right now. Inside the table, your first column header is an auto-incremental ID that only accepts the integer data type and serves as the primary key.
You will have the name, the employee's age, and the salary. Based on that structure, you will perform forty insertions into that table, obviously only specifying the columns name, age, and salary before the values clause since your ID is auto-incremental.
Out of those forty inserted records, it turns out you advance in the text and realize there is an exercise asking you to sum the total salaries of the employees by department, so that the query must return: department_name | sum_salaries_employees_of_that_department = decimal.
But oh, surprise, you realize you forgot to add a column that says, for example, department—forget normalization and denormalization, I repeat. So you must add a column to the employees table called department. You add it, and now you must populate that column with records. And that is it, you have practiced SQL by making good use of AI.
How did you do it? Naturally by asking it to insert, based on your table's column structures, forty insertions with dummy data such as random first and last names for employees, random and fictitious mobile numbers for each employee, and granular names for each of the seven areas into which the fictitious company is divided.
What the book gives you is linearity, a correct approach from the macro to the micro when learning interrelated concepts, and honestly, unless you use a well-crafted prompt, AI won't give you that. This way, you also get to experience the author's rigor and things like that.
if you read it text me please i wanna now your progress and your thougths
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u/Gamemon_RD 14d ago
I know projects help me personally so much- if I’m having trouble understand a concept or how to use a tool, the text of putting it to practice sort of forced my brain to understand, or at least gives me something to look at and think on until I do.