Data Engineering Zoomcamp

The Data Engineering Zoomcamp 2026 has officially wrapped up! You had 3 chances to submit your final project and review 3 peers. Congratulations to the 581 participants who successfully completed the course and earned their certificates! If you're one of the graduates, you can find your well-deserved certificate in your course enrollment profile. We encourage you to celebrate this milestone by sharing it on LinkedIn! Thank you goes out to everyone who joined us on this journey. We understand that not everyone was able to finish the course this time, and that’s perfectly fine. You’ll have another opportunity to complete it in a new cohort next year. Thank you all for contributing to the learning experience of this course and DataTalks.Club community overall. We appreciate your hard work!

I'm starting a workshop series to update the content of LLM Zoomcamp. Each workshop will update the content of one course module: ​May 11: Build Your First RAG Application May 18: From RAG to AI Agents: Function Calling and Tool Use May 21: Vector Databases May 27: RAG and Agents Evaluation June 3: Monitoring LLM Applications

Now Data Engineering Zoomcamp is almost over and I'm focusing on updating LLM Zoomcamp - the course about using GenAI, RAG and Agents We will have multiple workshops prior to the course start date which will be used as the videos for the course when it starts The first one is today. Join me if you're interested in GenAI!

If you submitted your project for the last attempt, now it's time to evaluate your peers You can find the assignments here: https://courses.datatalks.club/de-zoomcamp-2026/project/project3/eval Have fun!

Judging by the questions in Slack, I realize that our documentation may be not complete or straightforward I reorganized it a bit and here it is https://datatalks.club/docs/courses/zoomcamp-logistics/ I hope you fill find the answers to your questions (especially around projects and peer reviews)

Some of you forgot to submit the project, and some of you forgot to do peer reviews. I see from Telegram and Slack that there are quite a few of you in this situation. For those who already have a project but haven't submitted it yet, we have opened a third attempt. It has a very strict deadline, so you won't have time to develop a new project. You can only submit the existing one. https://courses.datatalks.club/de-zoomcamp-2026/project/project3 Good luck!

The certificates are ready! You'll find them in your enrollment profile for the course Don't forget to share them on LinkedIn! Thanks everyone for being a part of this course!

The form for submitting the second attempt is now closed. Now time to learn from your peers! If you submitted a project for attempt 2, you'll find the project review assignments here: https://courses.datatalks.club/de-zoomcamp-2026/project/project2/eval Have fun!

We have just scored project attempt 1 Congratulations to the 269 course participants who passed it! We will release the certificates for you later along with the second batch If you haven't passed it, you can improve it and submit one more time Note that if you did pass the project, submitting it again (even with improvements) is considered self-plagiarism. Please don't do it. But you can submit another project if you want Also if you haven't made a submission for attempt 1, attempt 2 is still open: https://courses.datatalks.club/de-zoomcamp-2026/project/project2 Have fun building!

Great job working on your projects! Now it's time to learn from your peers If you submitted your project for attempt, you will find your review assignments here: https://courses.datatalks.club/de-zoomcamp-2026/project/project1/eval If not - you still have time for attempt 2. Have fun!

A quick update: the Bruin project competition is now open to everyone! This means your submission does not have to be the same as your Zoomcamp final project. Even if you are not participating in the course, or if you are using other tech for your Zoomcamp final project, you can still build a separate project with Bruin, submit it to the competition, and compete for prizes. Prizes: 🔸 Mac Mini for an outstanding project 🔸 1 year Claude Pro for the top 3 projects 🔸 1 month Claude Pro for participants Deadline: Monday, June 1st, 12:00 UTC More details here: getbruin.com/competition

Build your project using Bruin for ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and analysis, share it with the community, and compete for prizes. Prizes: 🔸 Mac Mini for an outstanding project 🔸 1 year Claude Pro for the top 3 projects 🔸 1 month Claude Pro for participants To participate: 🔸 Build your Zoomcamp project using Bruin 🔸 Publish it on GitHub with a README 🔸 Share it in #projects on Slack Winners will be determined by community votes on Slack. Learn more here: https://getbruin.com/zoomcamp-project/

It’s time to apply everything from the course and build a complete end-to-end data pipeline. Your goal is to create a dashboard with two tiles, powered by a pipeline you design yourself. The project takes you through the full workflow: from raw data to a working visualization. 🎥 Watch the Projects how-to video for the full walkthrough and start building. 🏆 Tip: Use Bruin in your project to participate in the competition and win prizes. Details below.

I just realized we haven't shared the homework for streaming https://github.com/DataTalksClub/data-engineering-zoomcamp/blob/main/cohorts/2026/07-streaming/homework.md The deadline is moved to 20 March

We're starting module 7 on stream processing. Reminder: the previous homework deadline is in less than 24 hours. The materials were created by Zach Wilson, who ran a Flink stream for the course last year. Alexey recorded an updated Apache Flink workshop to reflect support for Flink 2.x and modern Python versions (3.12, 3.9, 3.8). It covers: • Streaming fundamentals in Data Engineering Zoomcamp • Kafka/Redpanda, Python producers and consumers • Writing streaming events to PostgreSQL • Apache Flink setup with Docker • Flink jobs for stream processing • Windowing, watermarks, and late events • Real-time aggregations with Flink Homework deadline: 17 March, 12 AM CET Learn here: https://github.com/DataTalksClub/data-engineering-zoomcamp/tree/main/07-streaming

https://alexeyondata.substack.com/p/how-i-dropped-our-production-database The post about the database incident last week

We're starting our stream about streaming! This is going to be a part of module 7 about streaming - and reworked workshop from the last year with the latest versions of PyFlink Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDUgFeHQzJU Workshop: https://github.com/DataTalksClub/data-engineering-zoomcamp/tree/main/07-streaming/workshop Watch now or later in recording!

We uploaded the video about creating projects to YouTube, as some of you reported having problems with watching in on Loom Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL0E8xO8OnE We'll also update it in the repo And by the way, don't forget about our docs: https://datatalks.club/docs/courses/data-engineering-zoomcamp/ There's a lot of useful information there

This week, we're starting Module 6: Batch Processing. Reminder: the previous homework deadline is in less than 24 hours. In this module, you'll learn how batch processing works with Spark and PySpark. You'll cover: • Batch processing fundamentals and Spark basics • Installing and running Spark locally or in Colab • Working with Spark SQL and DataFrames • Handling schemas and processing NYC taxi data • How Spark clusters, joins, and groupBy work internally • Running Spark in the cloud with Dataproc and BigQuery Homework deadline: 10 March, 12 AM CET We also recently had a workshop with dlt on AI-assisted data ingestion. Watch the recording and check out the code if you missed it. Practice what you learned in the homework assignment, and submit it here.