My Journey in Data Technology Field

Today, I have completed 17 years in IT industry,

probably a good time to reflect on my journey till date.

Back in 2005, in my first job, I started as SQL, PL/SQL developer,

we used to rate our insurance customers based on their last year’s claims.

In my next job, my employer sold a health insurance policy lifecycle management system,

it was an operational system and I used to support that and build new features on requirements.

Then one day our CTO called me, he wanted to know how the business was going on a weekly/monthly/quarterly basis,

we did not have a DWH back then, so used to write queries for the operational system itself.

Later on, as we matured, I built a DWH to streamline those BI requirements,

and I progressed writing ETL pipelines and BI queries mainly.

By 2012, I worked on the complete data lifecycle in the enterprise,

and I thought I knew everything about the data field.

But then I got to know about data science and big data ,

I learnt data science myself out of curiosity,

and got to work on big data tech-stack as part of my day job,

and I also got exposed to GCP cloud which was in nascent stage those days.

Initially, I was more inclined towards data science,

and I also got more opportunities in that area, maybe because of lack of resources.

But soon I realized that all current ML/AI space is data-driven,

and it all depends on the quality of data, i.e. garbage in - garbage out,

so I shifted my focus again towards data engineering and data architecture.

Since then I have been involved in designing, building, optimizing data platforms,

to support BI as well as ML/AI use cases,

ended up working on all three major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and GCP) in different jobs,

and these days I am called a cloud data technologist.

Already started being considered a veteran in the data field,

but considering this as an ever-evolving field,

I get to learn a thing or two new every day like DataOps, Data Mesh etc.

And I have been an individual contributor (IC) throughout,

while I love to mentor (and learn from) young (and bright) data engineers and data scientists.

#mystory #reflection #dataanalytics #dataengineering #dataarchitecture #datascience #myjourney #workanniversary *****

Ankit Rathi is a Cloud Data Technologist, published author & well-known speaker. His interest lies primarily in building end-to-end data/AI applications/products following best practices of Data Engineering and Architecture.

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