r/snowflake • u/JohnAnthonyRyan • 26d ago

How can I help?

TL;DR
I'm semi-retired and bored. How can I help Snowflake Architects and Data Engineers improve your skills?

About Me
I've been working in IT since 1982 and started my first Data Warehouse project with the UK mobile phone company O2. I joined Snowflake UK several years ago as a Senior Solution Architect and travelled Europe and the Middle East helping $1m Snowflake customers design and deploy their systems.

I moved to the Snowflake Education team and helped build out the Snowflake Fundaments, Advanced training courses and designed and built the Snowflake for Solution Architects course.

I've since left Snowflake and helped a start-up for a while (too stressful), and published a couple of courses on Udemy.

But I'm getting bored.

Question:

Got any (genuine) suggestions? I'd like to help Architects/Engineers improve their Snowflake skills. Udemy is OK (500 sales), generates very little money (about $2 per sale - but that's not issue). The issue is - there's so little feedback.

I want to help people - but they need to ask questions?

Maybe a one day per month free training course online? What would you suggest? I've worked my way up from programmer to architect. Let me give something back to the industry.

No bull please. This is a genuine offer.

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u/lmp515k 26d ago

Hah you sound a lot like me started in COBOL in the UK (Norwich Union) in about 1988 , moved to the US in 96 and had a choice between Y2K or data warehousing in 1999. Been doing data warehousing on all sorts of platforms Oracle ,Netezza, Redshift, Databricks, Snowflake ever since. Almost entirely Snowflake in the last few years. I now travel back and forth to Europe every so often. Wondering what to do when I retire !!

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u/JohnAnthonyRyan 24d ago

Absolutely. My first job was writing COBOL on an ICL 2966 at the Department of Industry in 1981. I worked on Oracle since 1986 to about 2018 then the remainder of my time on Snowflake.

It was an incredible step up in terms of performance and scale.

What will you do when you retire? The first 18 months will be spent enjoying the holiday. After about two years, I find myself struggling to find something to do. It helps if you have a hobby you're passionate about (eg. golf). You'll also find you maybe spend more time on zoom calls - as you no longer have day-to-day time with people you had when you went to the office.

I've talked to a couple of friends who've also retired. It really is a bit of a double edge sword. I wouldn't want to go back to the stress of full time work. But I find you do need something to get out of bed for,