Databricks Data Challenges for Upskilling

[BS_THE_ANALYST]

Hi all, 

I'm currently looking at upskilling in Databricks. I'd like to focus on becoming great at solving a variety of problems. I come with a background in the Alteryx community and they have something called Weekly Challenges: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Weekly-Challenges/bd-p/weeklychallenge#post_time|solved-and-unsolve... 

These challenges allow community members to work through a selection of problems and have difficulty tiers. You can also earn community badges by completing challenges & uploading your solutions to the post. This, in turn, helps share the solution knowledge and best practices with other members as they can download the solutions and learn from each other.

Is there something similar on Databricks? If not, let's get started! 😎. How can we begin? 

All the best,
BS

[SHIFTY]

Yeah I am very much in the camp of "learn by doing" so challenges would suit me! 👍

[TheOC]

Hey @BS_THE_ANALYST 
This feels like a fantastic idea - It'd also be interesting to see how other people solve the same challenges.

I believe there are some tasks / practical questions within the certifications and academy, so it would also work as a good learning opportunity for leading up to certification!

[Pilsner]

This is a great idea, @BS_THE_ANALYST. Always helpful to practice, but if we could share/ learn from each other too, that would be even better. 

[Advika]

Thanks for sharing, @BS_THE_ANALYST! It’s great to see the community’s interest in hands-on challenges and collaborative learning. We can definitely start something challenging here too! 😃

[BS_THE_ANALYST]

@Advika let me know if I can be of any help with building this at all. To get maximum engagement from the community, it'll be great if there can be badges (these show on the community profile) associated to completing these challenges. I.e. first 1, 5, 15, 30, 50, 75, 100,... 

We can build a community Challenge Leaderboard (30 day rolling leaderboard really interests new members, top challenge completers etc). We can build a downloadable databricks notebook that either scrapes or hits an API to reveal what challenges a person has completed etc (useful as the challenges grow).

Plenty of engagement here! It'll be great to see a community showing all the different approaches to the solution.

Challenges could range from simple ETL, data wrangling, data ingestion, or even investigating Databricks features like DLT, or exploring cool concepts like building idempotent pipelines. I guess that helps tier the difficulty levels i.e. beginner, advanced, etc

All the best,
BS