Techie Tuesday is our way of honoring Onix’s tech talent. It’s an opportunity for us to introduce our behind the scenes team and shine a light on them and their achievements.
This ongoing series gives you an inside look at what it takes to work in technology and shares the best tips for getting started in your career.
Longtime blog contributor, Trevor Warren, Data Architect is our latest guest. He works with customers to help them get the most from their data.
What is Your Role at Onix?
I design and architect data solutions for our customers; that is to say, I help them realize where they want to go and what they can do with the data that they may or may not know about. When I'm not doing that I work on tools that help automate some of our offerings, such as the GCP data lake foundation.
What Makes You Excited to Come to Work Each Day?
It's really fun exploring new customer environments and solving their unique challenges - that goes a long way in keeping things new and exciting on a regular basis. The most fun I have is when I get some down-time to work on tools internally that will help us automate and expand our offerings, the development work is a lot of fun.
Tell Us About Your Favorite Project.
My favorite project has been the Enterprise Data Warehouse project with Batteries Plus Bulbs. The Batteries+ team is a wonderful group of people and I have really enjoyed working with them through what has been a really fun yet challenging project.
What Do You Like to Do Outside of Work?
I love to play with my kids and hang out with my wife as much as I can, and when I'm not doing that I am a volunteer with our local fire department as an EMT because I enjoy the hands-on work and I get to help care for people at the same time. I also enjoy gardening because it is relaxing, and it is something I can do with my hands - something that I find important to balance as technology can feel ephemeral at times.
Share Something You Wish People in the Industry Knew.
That it is okay to specialize in an aspect of technology that you find enjoyable; development happens at a breakneck speed and it can be difficult to keep up with all of the developments happening while maintaining your day-to-day work.
Any Advice for Someone Looking to Do What You Do?
"Get your hands dirty," because the best way to find out what works and what doesn't is to dive in and give it a try. You'll learn a ton doing so and bring practical experience to the next project you're on. Additionally, build out a library of scripts/techniques/architectures that you can reuse as standard practices - for example, if you built a script to transform that CSV file you were playing around with into a parquet file, keep it - you'll find a need for it soon enough.
