251: Understand the Fundamentals Stay Curious and Never Give Up with Tobias Macey

<p>Phil’s guest on this episode of the IT Career Energizer podcast is Tobias Macey. He currently manages and leads the Technical Operations Team at MIT Open Learning where he designs and builds cloud infrastructure to power online access to education for the global MIT community.</p> <p>He also owns and operates Boundless Notions where he offers design, review, and implementation advice on data infrastructure and cloud automation.  And he’s the host of the weekly Python Podcast and the Data Engineering Podcast.</p> <p>In this episode, Phil and Tobias Macey discuss some of the assets MIT offers free of charge to the global community, including Open Courseware and the Open edXplatform. They talk about how knowing the fundamentals makes it easier to learn the latest tech.</p> <p>Tobias also talks about the advancements in the ability to gain insights in real-time from data and how data engineering will be the biggest driver for our global economy.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>KEY TAKEAWAYS:</strong></p> <p><strong>(5.06) TOP CAREER TIP</strong></p> <p>Make sure that you are always learning. But, also have a deep understanding of the fundamentals. Those are the things that never change and will make learning new techologies far easier. They are the foundations on which most new tech is built.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>(7.44) WORST CAREER MOMENT</strong></p> <p>Practically everyone that has ever worked in operations will have at one stage taken down the production system. Tobias shares an example of when he did exactly that and what the fallout from that was. As well as how he fixed it.</p> <p> </p> <p>That particular mistake taught him to put in place strong guardrails. It also taught him not to panic when things go wrong. Worrying gets you nowhere.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>(10.15) CAREER HIGHLIGHT</strong></p> <p>Having the opportunity to run his podcasts and ask the industry's innovators interesting questions. In the podcast, Tobias shares the story of how he got started and how you can potentially do something similar.</p