Hey Hackers! I’m Veronika, and I’m the Data engineer @ Sber.
First of all, a huge thank you to the HackerNoon community and staff for nominating me for a 2021 Noonies award! I’ve been] nominated in the following categories; please do check out these award pages and vote:
- HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - python : https://noonies.tech/award/2021-hackernoon-contributor-of-the-year-python
- HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - python-tutorials : https://noonies.tech/award/2021-hackernoon-contributor-of-the-year-python-tutorials
- HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - sql : https://noonies.tech/award/2021-hackernoon-contributor-of-the-year-sql
As someone in the IT industry, I believe that the most exciting technology of the present is
cloud services because it allows you to scale up in a short period of time with just a few clicks. Learn more about my thoughts and opinions on cloud services and my journey in the tech industry via the interview below.
1. What do you do, and why do you do it? (tell us your story)
I work as a data engineer and teach python at the Higher School of Economics. Working with data fascinates me, I like to learn new things, learn new techniques that optimize my work, and hone my programming skills. I teach because I want to share my experience, reinforce the basics and go through more complex tasks with students.
2. Tell us more about the things you create / write / manage / build!
My team is developing an IVR voice robot. An IVR voice robot is a huge graph. Each node is technical information about a session or client or the bot's response. Each client request is sent to a speech recognizer, which converts the voice into text, and then the text is sent to a classification model, which determines the intent. That way, we can understand what people are trying to tell us, and then they send some kind of response to the node.
In fact, my main tasks are:
- Creating showcases for analysts who need to extract data very quickly. In order to achieve this, I make spark applications that analyze unstructured data, for example.
- I also work in Greenplum (which is an mpp database (short for massively parallel processing)) and do pre-calculations and make showcases for analysts.
- In our team, most of the common and interesting data is what customers say, i.e., text data. Therefore, I usually work with special libraries for text analysis, build n-grams, do lemmatization and stemming, and create a cluster model for the segmentation of these texts.
3. How did you end up on your current career path? Do you like it?
I graduated from the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation with a degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. Then I started to work in a small company. The university gave me a good foundation and the ability to learn, so I started to learn sql and python almost immediately. I worked as a data analyst for a while and studied Data Science. But it just so happened that I was more interested in studying big data, so I started developing in that area.
4. What tech are you most excited or passionate about right now and why?
I like the products of the Apache Foundation group best. Like Spark, Airflow, Flink. Thanks to these technologies, we are able to process huge amounts of data, whereas before, we could only dream of such possibilities.
5. What tech are you most worried about right now and why?
Cloud services and data storage seem to be promising and innovative technology. But at the moment, its implementation is constrained by different limiting factors.
The first are restrictions imposed by the state, for example, a requirement of having servers located on the territory of the country. Secondly, companies still fear for the security and integrity of their data and are reluctant to invest in such projects.
6. If we gave you 10 million dollars to invest in something today, what would you invest in and why?
Cloud services. Like Big Data technologies are doing it nowadays, I think sooner or later, Cloud services will take over the world.
7. What are you currently learning?
I am currently trying to develop in two areas: hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills because advanced technologies and approaches to development change rapidly. It is impossible to stop developing in your field. And soft skills - because I want to learn how to share my knowledge effectively.
8. What’s the best advice you’ve ever given someone?
As nobody is immune to burnout it is very important to maintain a work-life balance. And once upon a time, it was the best advice I had given to myself.
9. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
I think it was the advice given to me by a colleague many years ago to start learning python. It gave me the opportunity to move up the career ladder and, as a consequence, now I am a HackerNoon Noonie nominee.
About HackerNoon’s 2021 Noonie Awards
The annual Noonie Awards celebrate the best and brightest of the tech industry, bringing together all who are making the Internet and the world of tech what it is today. Please be sure to check out our award categories, nominate, and vote for the people and companies who you think are making the biggest impact on the tech industry today.
The 2021 Noonies are sponsored by: bybit, Dottech Domains, and Avast. Thank you so much to these sponsors who are helping us celebrate the accomplishments of all our nominees.