Alexander Garcia

DataCamp Associate AI Engineer for Developers series: Part 1

Talking about the Working with OpenAI API course at DataCamp as part of the Associate AI Engineer for Developers course

Read time is about 4 minutes

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Background

As noted in my other blog post about my New Years Resolution 2026 I have been working through my Associate AI Engineer for Developers course on DataCamp. To keep myself on task to accomplishing my goal I plan to document my experience and what I've learned in each course.

Course

Working with the OpenAI API

Prerequisites: Intermediate Python

This course covers three main sections:

  • Introduction to the OpenAI API,
  • Prompting OpenAI Models, and
  • Building Conversations with the OpenAI API.

Review

tl;dr - I really enjoyed the introductory course into working with the OpenAI (aka ChatGPT) API. It offered a simple approach with practical applications for real-world problems.

Here is what I learned:

  • How to programmatically create calls through OpenAI's APIs in Python
  • Three different prompting strategies: zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot prompting
  • How the various request parameters (like temperature and max_completion_tokens) affect model outputs
  • The purpose of user, assistant, and system roles in structuring conversations
  • How to evaluate API usage costs by calculating input and output token charges

Pros/Cons

Pros:

  • The hands-on exercises helped reinforce concepts through interactive coding practice
  • Practical examples demonstrated real-world use cases that I can apply to my own projects

Cons:

  • Some of the APIs used in the course were deprecated, which required me to dig for the proper API documentation
  • A few instructions were unclear, which led to some frustration while working through exercises

Final thoughts

I would recommend this course to beginners who want to get started with the OpenAI API. It provides a solid foundation for understanding how to interact with LLMs programmatically. Just be prepared to look up updated API syntax if you encounter deprecated methods.

Here is my certificate if anyone cares to see.