Zach Wilson's Recent LinkedIn Posts

AI and data engineering are so similar it's painful! - Agent workflows = data pipelines - Chunking text = data modeling - Embeddings = dimensionality reduction - Retrieval = indexing and partitioning - Vector search = join optimization - Prompt engineering = query tuning - Guardrails = data quality checks If you don't see how these parallels mean data engineers are going to take over the world, you're blind!

DataExpert AI Engineering Cohort Kickoff March 30th

The March 31st AI boot camp will be amazing! Here’s what the 5 weeks will look like Week 1: - Zach Wilson - teaches custom AI agents with LangChain, MCP, and how to get started Week 2: - Kevin Naughton - teaches how to optimize your dev workflow with Claude Code and Codex. How to create bug free code with these AI tools Week 3: - Carly Taylor and Drew Maring - teach OpenClaw and automating business processes. You’ll understand when to pick OpenClaw vs NemoClaw vs Claude Cowork Week 4: - Delia Lazarescu - teaches preventing catastrophic failures with OpenClaw and measuring actual business value from your AI agents Week 5: - Zach Wilson - teaches end-to-end AI application including deploy, CI/CD, evaluations, monitoring, and cost usage Alongside this content will be 5 additional pre-recorded modules on: - prompt engineering - auto prompt optimization with dspy - RAG and context engineering - how to make MCP work for you, not against you - LLMOps and guaranteeing quality in production - n8n workflows and end-to-end AI This will be the best AI boot camp of 2026. Spend April to become AI literate! Send me a DM with “I’m in” to get sent a discount for this! P.s. We offer additional discounts for companies looking to buy many seats!

I’m glad I relied on StackOverflow for regexes long enough so that AI can do them for me now and I can avoid learning them entirely. What skill do you feel smart avoiding learning because AI can now do it?

Building Data Pipelines has levels to it: - level 0 Understand the basic flow: Extract → Transform → Load (ETL) or ELT This is the foundation. - Extract: Pull data from sources (APIs, DBs, files) - Transform: Clean, filter, join, or enrich the data - Load: Store into a warehouse or lake for analysis You’re not a data engineer until you’ve scheduled a job to pull CSVs off an SFTP server at 3AM! level 1 Master the tools: - Airflow for orchestration - dbt for transformations - Spark or PySpark for big data - Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift for warehouses - Kafka or Kinesis for streaming Understand when to batch vs stream. Most companies think they need real-time data. They usually don’t. level 2 Handle complexity with modular design: - DAGs should be atomic, idempotent, and parameterized - Use task dependencies and sensors wisely - Break transformations into layers (staging → clean → marts) - Design for failure recovery. If a step fails, how do you re-run it? From scratch or just that part? Learn how to backfill without breaking the world. level 3 Data quality and observability: - Add tests for nulls, duplicates, and business logic - Use tools like Great Expectations, Monte Carlo, or built-in dbt tests - Track lineage so you know what downstream will break if upstream changes Know the difference between: - a late-arriving dimension - a broken SCD2 - and a pipeline silently dropping rows At this level, you understand that reliability > cleverness. level 4 Build for scale and maintainability: - Version control your pipeline configs - Use feature flags to toggle behavior in prod - Push vs pull architecture - Decouple compute and storage (e.g. Iceberg and Delta Lake) - Data mesh, data contracts, streaming joins, and CDC are words you throw around because you know how and when to use them. What else belongs in the journey to mastering data pipelines?

Don’t be afraid to reinvent yourself! Don’t stop learning the lessons the universe is throwing at you. Sleep well to allow your brain strong plasticity so you don’t have to relearn painful lessons as many times in a row. Remember you can fail for 7 years straight and still be young and able to continue taking risks The only true failures and tragedies in this world is choosing a smaller life because you’re too scared of the big life that the universe wants to give you

Each student will be given a 50M token budget to work with during the AI boot camp on March 31st. The models they can work with: - Claude Sonnet, Claude Haiku - GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini They can use Codex or Claude Code for free. This is ~$250 worth of tokens to learn with! Over a billion tokens will be burned by students in April to make Jensen Huang proud! Send me a DM with "I'm in" to get a discount for the boot camp

AI is here! We need to be learning it as quickly as possible! It’s not too late to join my AI cohort! You can get a last minute discount to join at DataExpert.io/IACCEPT

We're changing the DataExpert.io cohort refund policy. The old policy was: - 75% refund if requested in week 1 - 50% refund if requested in week 2 - No refunds afterward The new policy is: - 100% refund if requested in week 1 - No refunds afterward This does two things: - increases sales on the front end and allows customers to "try it out." - forces customers to decide within a week if it's for them (reducing our operational overhead) This comes with a trade-off for fence sitters. It allows them to run away from self-improvement because they can leave "without impact." But that's okay because those students weren't going to be serious anyway, and they can go waste their refunded money on candy and Fortnite skins.

Every Claude Code session, OpenClaw session, and LangChain will be graded for you in the AI boot camp starting this week. Learn how to prompt better Learn how to use fewer tokens to get the same result Learn how to prevent serious security issues while developing AI applications Send me a DM with the words “I’m in” to get a discount for the March 31st boot camp!

Data Expert 3 Year Anniversary Live!

Many people ask me for 1:1s to boost their confidence It’s rarely about clarity or my expertise It’s almost always about permission to step into their next form of greatness Sadly, I cannot take very many of these because my time is becoming increasingly scarce and limited. I wish I could teach the world 1:1 but that’s not how the world works. Luckily, my step dad Mike Pinckney is currently offering FREE 1:1 mindset coaching that you should 100% check out. Mike has helped me step through some dark and foggy times with confidence. And I know he’d be able to do the same for you!

LLMs have ruined today Everything you say today can and will be used against you in the court of AI With that being said, I’m proud to announce I’m pregnant!

At 5 PM Pacific, I'll be discussing the best cohort to join in 2026. Carly Taylor and Kevin Naughton will be joining me to teach all the hottest things in AI. Learn OpenClaw with Carly Master how to code in the age of AI with Kevin Create powerful agents with Zach Join the Zoom call at 5 PM to get all your questions answered!

Microsoft fabric is just Databricks from Temu

We know breaking into tech isn't always easy. And sometimes life gets in the way. If you've been recently laid off or are making your way back into the workforce, we want to help. We're offering a limited number of scholarships for our upcoming AI Engineering Bootcamp. Each scholarship is 40% off the enrollment fee, because we believe access to good education shouldn't depend on your circumstances. Apply here 👉 dataexpert.io/scholarships Applications close Friday. Enrollment closes Sunday. A couple of things to know : scholarships are limited and this is genuinely for people who need it. If that's you, please don't hesitate to apply. Let's build together💙

Europe being asleep at the AI wheel is going to imporverish them and India will step up and take the wheel

Crushing GTC with Delia was amazing this year!