Over 15 years as a database developer and 5 years as a data engineer, I’ve been working with data my entire career. Starting as a teenager, using Filemaker Pro to help my father run his distributing company, one of my first paying roles was to write an Access database using Visual Basic to download automated fuel consumption/levels for a gasoline supplier.

I later progressed to Microsoft SQL Server, working as a database developer for about 12 years, specializing in high-throughput OLTP work in SQL Server (ahem… as “high-throughput” as you can be in an undistributed environment). Seeing the market shift away from this technology, I shifted my specialty to data warehousing.

Fortunately, I was able to make natural transitions from database developer to data engineer picking up new skills along the way. A project replicating SQL Server warehouse data to Redshift was a great introduction to AWS technologies that had me anxious to learn new technologies to become a successful data engineer.

Missing from that “natural transition” was exposure to “big data” technologies like Apache Airflow, Spark, Kafka, etc., so I enrolled in UW Big Data Engineering certificate program. This nine-month course provided intensive exposure to the areas I’d been missing and helped lead to my job with Twich, which used many of the things I had just been learning.