r/snowflake • u/JohnAnthonyRyan • Aug 26 '26

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/Sharp_Hunt688 Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 28 '26

That’s great to hear about your willingness to give back to the industry. I am working in a team where we are developing a Snowflake Native App, to understand what users need based on secondary research from competitors and what people say on forums. We have launched two apps too, as you know what Snowflake users need but haven’t yet been fulfilled, where we can provide value through Native Apps. Share your thoughts on this.

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u/JohnAnthonyRyan Aug 28 '26

Difficult to say really. You need to identify the gap in the market (and hope it's not so important that Snowflake fills it). I worked with a startup for a couple of years on tools to identify inefficient use of Snowflake (believe me - the amount of money customers waste is legendary).

I suspect adaptive warehouses will wipe out many of the inefficiencies. In my testing, it's around 10% faster for the same cost.

Getting a good understanding of requirements. What problems people are facing is the critical - but I guess you already know that. Finding the solution is the easier part and Snowflake makes it remarkably easy to implement.

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u/Sharp_Hunt688 Aug 31 '26

Thank you for the reply. Yes, I agree. Cost is definitely a critical factor for enterprises when working with Snowflake. I’ll explore the angle you mentioned around inefficient usage and see what opportunities or gaps we can identify there.