HEY YOU!
I am Paul and, in this blog, we dive into my first month as a junior data engineer at Xomnia. It was a month with a lot of firsts. My first grown man’s job, the first junior data engineering class, my first well-deserved Friday drink, and last but not least I got my first Xomnia Hoodie.
At Xomnia, I joined the Junior Development Program (now known as the Data and ML Engineer Program), with focus on data engineering. My first month as a data engineer was awesome. Four days a week, I worked for a client and one day (Friday) I had a day full of technical training and personal development. The combination of trainings and working for a client really helps boost your data capabilities, and I will tell you more about this in this blog.
Why did I choose the Junior Data Engineering track?
Forrester wrote a report titled: ‘Data Engineers Have Become More Important Than Data Scientists’, and sorry my fellow Data Science colleagues, but I believe in that too. As a data engineer, we construct and maintain big data lakes in real-time. A data lake is a large storage place that stores all the data of the company in its original format until the information is required to solve a business need.
I love the fact that as a data engineer you can make the difference for the data scientist. We make sure to create a data flow between different information systems to provide data scientists with good data quality to work with. As a data engineer, I communicate a lot with data scientists, to ensure that the real-time big data lake supports the requirements, and that business needs can actually be solved with data.
Apply to the Data and ML Engineering Program
Working as a data engineer at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
At the client, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, I supported two teams: One team was building a new real-time big data lake, while the other team was supporting the operational decision-making within KLM. The subjects really varied, from working on the boarding process to keeping track of the aircraft maintenance. At KLM, we used various innovative Apache services, such as Hadoop, Hive, and Spark. Most of the code was written in Scala and Python.
It was fantastic to have the opportunity to expand my skill set at the client. Already in my second week of training at Xomnia, I learned about Apache Hive, and I was able to immediately apply it at my client. I helped KLM with finding new ways to load the data from Hive so the data could be accessed as quickly as possible and wouldn’t be locked by the Hadoop Distributed File System. Learning something new that I could use for solutions in my work activities - How cool is that? It was awesome to work on a big data platform that helped KLM to really improve their business processes!
Xomnia Friday = soaking up knowledge day
Xomnia Friday passes by in the blink of an eye. The day is filled with interesting opportunities and a lot of laughter with the other juniors. The Juniors at Xomnia have various backgrounds: People come from mathematics, econometrics, computer science, data science, and artificial intelligence backgrounds. I, for example, have a background in cloud computing, which is a specialization within the field of computer science.
After my first month, I can say that Xomnia is truly having an impact on both artificial intelligence and the Juniors that are part of its team.
Written by: Paul Velthuis, Junior Data Engineer at Xomnia and KLM