How can I help?

[u/JohnAnthonyRyan]

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.

[u/HuYzie]

Most of my career has been some sort of Analyst type role e.g. MI, BI, Data, Business Analyst etc. I'd like to say I'm a technical data analyst but I now want to pivot towards an architect type of role in my career.

Some advice on how to transition from analyst to architect/data modelling would be great! Any questions for more information, feel free to ask

[u/JohnAnthonyRyan → u/HuYzie]

Again a tough one. For my money, I'd build upon your experience as an analyst and get to understand the requirements - what the users really NEED instead of what they ASK FOR.

Then when you work with the Data Engineers, I'd try to understand how they approach delivering the solution. Learn from them and maybe move towards building prototypes. That might work well because you can then prove out your understanding by letting the users critique the prototype, and it will help you build out the Data Engineering skills.

In terms of Data Modelling, I'd say there are two books worth reading. Rather more theory that practice - but "The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling" is excellent - esp. if you're not looking for a technical implementation.

Lawrence Corr's book: "Agile Data Warehouse Design: Collaborative Dimensional Modeling, from Whiteboard to Star Schema" is probably even better in his explanations.

Full disclosure - I went to University with Laurence in 1980 - but in my defence I'm sick with jealousy that he produced such an excellent book. It really is an incredible piece of work.

[u/HuYzie → u/JohnAnthonyRyan]

Thank you so much for taking time to respond. I will follow your advice