Meet Oliver…
I work as an Academy Team Lead on behalf of Xander Talent, a digital talent consultancy and an official Education Partner for Quantexa. My main responsibility involves supporting the many learners in the Quantexa Academy through leading code reviews and support calls, creating educational content, delivering in-person workshops, and being an active member of the Quantexa Community.
Before embarking on my voyage into Software and Big Data, I worked professionally as a session musician, recording and touring the world with many different bands and artists. I’m trained in Jazz Piano, and a huge fan of jazz giants like Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Brad Mehldau, and Thelonious Monk. I listen to all types of music and continue to practice and play gigs whenever I can in my spare time.
I fell in love with coding in the early months of 2021, when I enrolled in a Full-Stack Web Development bootcamp. Through learning languages and frameworks like Python, JavaScript, React, Django, and Flask, I built a solid foundation which I continue to build upon to this day.
There are many parallels between software/data engineering and music; both require a great deal of practice to gain good technical skills, and both industries involve collaborating with others, which I love to do.
What do you enjoy most in your role?
While I find all aspects of my role fulfilling and enriching, I must admit that I love debugging and troubleshooting issues in support calls and the Academy Q&A Topic. While learners are working on their assessment projects, a lot of issues they encounter are unique to the individual, and debugging these issues requires a different approach or way of thinking, and I really enjoy that challenge.
I also believe it’s important to use any debugging sessions as a learning experience for myself and the learner; instead of simply instructing the learner to change their code in X, Y, or Z places, I do what I can to guide them to find the solution independently, through their own initiative. By taking this approach, the learning experience of a debugging session is maximized, both for the learner and for myself.
What are your main goals as an Academy Team Lead?
I would consider myself to have done a decent job if the learner graduates from the Quantexa Academy with the foundational skills to operate independently on a project, using best practices.
Once a learner has a solid foundational knowledge of ETL, Entity Resolution, Network Generation, Scoring, or UI configuration, they will be in an ideal position to dive deeper into the platform by using the Documentation Site. Whether I am leading training sessions, assessments, and support calls, or creating content, I always aim for the learner to leave with a little more knowledge and independence.
How would you describe a typical day where you have used Quantexa?
My day often begins with jumping on the 8 am support call, with a full cafetiere by my side. Sometimes I am not assigned as the leader for the support call, but I enjoy being involved nonetheless, helping learners wherever I can. While providing assistance, I load up my project in my VDI. Recently, I have been using the Academy Tutorial example project to inspect and interrogate the parquet outputs of Batch Entity Resolution, in order to demonstrate the impacts of Entity Resolution Tuning in the Resolver Configuration JSON file. I am documenting my findings in written educational content that I am creating for the latest, upcoming version of the Quantexa Data Engineer Academy. It is my hope that the result of my explorations will provide some good learning experiences and ‘aha!’ moments for others.
What are your most memorable moments in your Quantexa journey?
I was fortunate enough to have recently been involved in delivering the Data Engineer Velocity program in person in Bangalore, India. I worked closely with AndrewBirch (another Xander Academy Team Lead) and Irena_Yanachkova (Quantexa’s Senior Instructional Designer), in which we delivered an in-depth program which lasted for 3 weeks. Through daily in-person sessions, we guided twelve learners through all the fundamental aspects and areas of a Quantexa implementation, along with the Spark and Scala techniques necessary to be an effective Quantexa Data Engineer. The sessions included group discussions, code-alongs, and we also provided dedicated one-to-one support to each individual.
The learners we worked with were all so lovely and generous, and it was really enriching to develop a great working relationship with them through learning. It was such a rewarding experience, and I am so grateful to have been involved.
What are you excited about in your industry at the moment?
It’s exciting to be working with a technology that has such a broad positive impact. Of course, Quantexa is pretty much synonymous with Anti-Money Laundering (AML), though its applications go beyond the AML/Finance sphere, as has been demonstrated with their recent partnership with the Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative, as one example.
Through partnerships like this, it’s clear that Quantexa’s technology is being used for more than decision-intelligence and risk management alone; organisations are using Quantexa to help in their efforts to ensure people’s safety and to improve the lives of others. It’s this kind of flexibility and positive impact that I am proud to be associated with.
What advice do you have for someone just starting out with Quantexa?
For anyone new to Quantexa, my main advice would be not to start coding until you have a decent understanding of the concepts and the data that you are working with.
For any learners embarking on the Quantexa Data Engineer Academy, this rule especially applies to approaching the CreateCaseClass script in Assessment 1a. Before you start coding, make sure you spend at least a day analyzing the different datasets, and how they fit together. If you do this before you write any code, I think you will find the CreateCaseClass script a breeze!
What is your favorite area of the Quantexa Community?
You will always catch me in the Academy Q&A area of the community. I recently received the title of ‘Grandmaster’. Those who know me will know how much of a buzz this gives me.
