Course 5 · Tooling

Tooling & the Modern Stack

You can build the parts; now learn to ship them like a professional. This course is about the engineering workflow around the data work — collaborating with git, containerizing and wiring your whole stack with Docker, the cloud primitives every platform runs on, automating tests and deploys with CI/CD, defining infrastructure as code, and monitoring it all. This is the difference between "it works on my machine" and "it works for the team, in production."

From building to operating

Courses 3–4 made you able to build pipelines. This course makes you able to run them reliably with other people. By the end your mini-griddp repo is a single, reproducible, tested, monitored stack you can stand up with one command — exactly what the Capstone (Course 6) puts to work.

Chapters
00 Start Here What "tooling" really means, and why the workflow around your code matters as much as the code. The map of this course. 01 Professional Git & Collaboration Beyond the basics — branching strategies, pull requests, code review, and resolving merge conflicts. How teams actually work in a shared repo. Hands-on. 02 Docker Deeper Write your own Dockerfiles, understand images and layers, and master Compose — networking, volumes, and env — so you can package and run anything reproducibly. Hands-on. 03 Wiring the Mini-Platform Assemble Postgres, Redpanda, dbt, Dagster, DuckDB, and a BI tool into one Docker Compose stack — with clean config, environments, and secrets. One command to a running platform. Hands-on. 04 Cloud Fundamentals The primitives every platform runs on — object storage, compute, managed warehouses, identity and access (IAM), regions, and the cost model. Vendor-neutral, with AWS/GCP examples. 05 CI/CD for Data Automate quality and deployment — GitHub Actions, running dbt and pipeline tests on every pull request, and shipping changes safely. The safety net that lets teams move fast. Hands-on. 06 Infrastructure as Code Why clicking around a cloud console doesn't scale, and how Terraform defines infrastructure in version-controlled code — providers, resources, state, and plan/apply. Hands-on. 07 Observability & Monitoring Knowing your platform is healthy — logs, metrics, and alerts; data observability; dashboards for the platform itself; and the basics of on-call, SLAs, and SLOs.
What you'll have

By the end you'll have a professional workflow: a clean git collaboration habit, a one-command reproducible platform, a mental map of the cloud, a CI pipeline that tests every change, infrastructure defined as code, and monitoring that tells you when something breaks. Course 6 (Capstone Labs) uses all of it to build and operate one end-to-end platform.