Coming Back With A Clearer Direction

Sometimes the hardest part of starting something new isn't learning the skill.

It's deciding that you're actually going to give yourself permission to try. I think a lot of people know that feeling. You start learning something, you're excited about it, and then life happens. Other responsibilities come up. Doubts start creeping in. You begin questioning whether you've chosen the right career or whether you're even making progress. At some point, you realize that you don't necessarily need another answer — you need to decide what you are willing to keep showing up for. That was where I found myself. After some time away, I decided to come back to Data Engineering, but with a different approach: less thinking about whether I was “ready” and more actually doing the work.

I downloaded a Nigerian property dataset and started exploring it with Python and Jupyter. I cleaned the data, worked through duplicate records, and loaded the cleaned dataset into Supabase. Then I worked with Nigerian GDP data from the World Bank and built another small pipeline to prepare and load it into my database. Along the way, things broke, connections failed, and I had to figure things out one problem at a time. You can find the projects on my GITHUB if you would like to see what I've been building. One thing I'm beginning to understand is that progress doesn't always look like a huge breakthrough. Sometimes it's simply opening the notebook again. Fixing the error. Finishing the dataset. Saving the project. Doing it again the next day. Those small actions start to become evidence that you're actually becoming the person you said you wanted to be.

I'll be sharing what I learn along the way - Including the mistakes. Still learning. Still figuring it out. Still building.