Last week my teammate Marius Obert shared his Learning Bucket List for Cloud Development in 2020. This made me thinking and summarizing mine too. Marius’es focus is primarily on the cloud-based development, mine is on all-things-data development.

During recent SAP TechEd I shared with Ian Thain my thoughts on being a data developer and trends I think are relevant nowadays.

So, my bucket list for 2020

After collecting my thoughts I realized that I do not have specific technologies or frameworks in mind, but rather trying to identify directions in which things are evolving, and what tech I need to work with to get it right. Some of these directions have clear leading technologies, but it does not mean that I should ignore runners-up as my goal is not to follow the crowd, but to have my own perspective.

Data Engineering

We’ve all heard about Data Science, which has been buzzing for recent years. But before a data scientist can do their magic with the data they need data engineers to properly design data structures and to build data pipelines.

SAP Data Intelligence (a successor of SAP Data Hub and SAP Leonardo ML Foundations) is a product that facilitates and integrates the work done by both teams — data engineers and data scientists.

This is the product I plan to keep exploring and sharing with you in 2020. And this will drive as well the rest of my bucket list.

Multi-model data

You might seen some of my blogs discussing spatial and graph processing. With the development of the data engineering approach to extract value from all sources of data (irrespective of their structure, speed and location) I think that multi-model data processing will keep growing. I want to stay on top of that for sure.

Machine Learning

Accordingly to many of recent surveys the most popular ML frameworks right now are TensorFlow and scikit-learn. And these are the ones I plan to get started with this year.

But I would like to keep an eye on other rapidly evolving frameworks, like Keras, Torch, MXNet too.

Interactive data processing…

Even though I have used both Jupyter and Zeppelin to some extend in the past, this year I would like to get deeper unveiling the full power of notebooks for interactive data processing. Jupyter comes embedded within SAP Data Intelligence, so obviously this is the first candidate for me.

…and data visualization

Surprise, surprise, but it seems like there are more ways to visualize data than bar and donut charts, so new libraries and approaches are still surfacing. Recently I have seen a presentation of data viz trends by Jan Fetzer and it was really inspirational!

I am talking not only about tabular data, but as well spatial, connected and textual data.

Programming languages

Even though I’ve been using Python and JavaScript for a while, I feel like am still just scratching the surface of possibilities. So, this year it will be continuation of exploration how to use these languages more productively for data processing and visualization — stand alone, but as well within SAP Data Intelligence and in SAP Analytics Cloud.

One new language I would like to have a look at is Go. It is a primary language in which SAP Data Intelligence was coded and it can be used to write powerful and top performing custom operators in this product.

What’s on your learning bucket list for this year — data-related or not? What would you suggest me adding/reviewing? Please leave your comments below.

Enjoy Y2K2D,
-Vitaliy aka @Sygyzmundovych