13 Weeks have gone in a flash:

Coming from Innovation Engineering, I knew where disruption had its greatest impact and that is data, being exposed to a Big Data module I knew that is where my strengths lie, and I wanted to perfect them.

Now we are 13 weeks in, how the time flies! Training is almost over and a bank full of skills in my pocket, with a healthy application and real-world examples to validate them.  Let me take you along my journey:

Our first stop is Excel, exploring a superstore dataset, presenting, and visualising our findings and discussing with stakeholders our predictions and how they’ll affect business sales and their product portfolios. Excel has so much to explore thus it’s a vital asset to your skills portfolio. Short pitstops aid our interviewing skills and perfect our presentation styles with hosted debating motions such as ‘Cat vs Dogs’; Cats champion, but I might be biased. Rockborne the movie has just started but I was already looking forward to the SQL (sequel) . Our next stop:

SELECT SQL FROM all_skills                                                                                                          LIMIT(S EXCEEDED)

With an AGGREGATED two weeks of projects looking at bike sharing datasets and discussing potential opportunities from analysing the dataset with stakeholders such as exploring routes, and investigating stakeholder company interests created a buzzing environment of fast pace and insightfulness. WITH PostgreSQL on PGAdmin I gained a deeper understanding. The data coaches facilitated an environment to discover different database structures thus giving us a holistic view of SQL and its benefits.

Between SQL and Excel, Tableau and PowerBI wizzes were born and suddenly our graphs were no longer just the standard but businesses ready with interactive dashboards, displaying data in consumable and less mundane ways.

Big Guns emerged for Big Data on our third stop along the way were teaching Python with libraries such as pandas, machine learning with PySpark, using orchestrated containers with the industry standards such as Docker and Kubernetes, launching virtual machines on Cloud Web Services  (Google & Amazon) looking at end-to-end pipelines using web scraping with selenium to collate data and then after all the training a trip to Big Data London.

And now specialising in my certifications on AWS and Tableau  – Shall I call myself well-rounded or will you?

My favourite part of the training was the Dev Ops elements – I was a detective in understanding the pods and jobs running, Daemon Sets and their use cases. YAML files and CLI interfaces on Linux-based virtual machines.

Reading this you might think there is no chance for enjoyment, but laughter is always amidst the training, rounders matches for team building, quiz nights with so much personality from the Peoples team, coaches to trainees, talent shows raising money for the floods in Pakistan. Fun is in every corner with Data through and through.

Borne to Rock at Rockborne!

Find out more about the Rockborne graduate programme here.