I received some advice recently, saying that I'd be better off following my alternative self-taught plan of building a foundation from learning Python, and that I'd be taking on a bit too much trying to contribute to such a large scale project without a solid foundation. I was going to follow what Trevor Blackwell suggests in his FAQ (http://tlb.org/#faq), learning Python and C, and reading through some Python libraries and the interpreter written in C. Python is directly applicable to my job and could perhaps help me land a data engineering role.
Which plan would you suggest? Any idea how long it would take to get to the point where I'd be able to make decent contributions to such a large project? Thanks!