Landed a DE student job using Palantir Foundry but I have zero coding experience. Kinda panicking.

Source: Dev.to

Situation

I landed a data engineering working‑student role at a major automotive firm (powertrain production). The tech stack is Palantir Foundry, Python, and TypeScript for dashboards.

Full disclosure: I have virtually no coding experience—just “vibecoding” with AI for university assignments. I have four weeks to go from “prompt engineer” to being genuinely useful.

Based on the job description, my responsibilities will include:

• Building data pipelines
• Modeling complex manufacturing data flows
• Creating dashboards to answer logistics questions

I don’t have access to Foundry yet, so I need a concrete prep plan.

Backend

• With manufacturing/IoT data in Foundry, will I be using PySpark primarily, or is Pandas sufficient?
• Should I focus first on mastering DataFrame operations, or prioritize SQL/data modeling concepts?

Frontend

• In Foundry’s UI tools (Slate/Workshop), is the TypeScript work heavy coding, or is it mostly gluing JSONs together to configure visualizations?

Survival

• What’s the 80/20 learning path that will get me productive quickly and avoid looking like I’m just pasting ChatGPT code on day one?

Any brutal honesty and advice would be greatly appreciated!