Mike Roberts — From Professional Poker Player to Data Engineer

Mike Roberts, Data Engineer

Mike Roberts is a data engineer, working closely with data scientists, but that was never his plan. After getting a degree in physics, he gave art management and professional poker playing a shot before becoming a BI analyst. That’s when he discovered Dataquest.

Getting Started at Dataquest

He joined Dataquest to improve his BI skills, but he quickly learned he could switch to a much more interesting role within data science. For the first time, he was excited about his career opportunities.

Python is a great language, very welcoming community

Learning with the Dataquest Community

The intuitive learning process at Dataquest helped — Mike liked the read + code platform, and the logical progression of courses: “I never became frustrated with technical problems, or had to waste time watching a video before getting on with coding.”

If he hit a wall, the Slack community was there to help. Both his fellow students and Dataquest teachers were quick to respond and lend a hand. He advises learners to go through courses more than once — “It’s tempting to just tick things off, but it’ll embed better in your brain if you go back and redo things that were difficult.”

Standing Out to Employers

When it came time to job hunt, the projects he’d built at Dataquest made all the difference — he didn’t start getting callbacks until he put those projects up on GitHub for potential employers to review.

“The Spark course really helped when interviewing.” His employer has promised him a lot of variety, so he looks forward to building on his engineering knowledge, and continuing to study data science.