June Featured Member of the Month !
🎉 Werner Stinckens 🎉
Job Title: Data Engineer @ Van de Velde (www.vandevelde.eu)
What are three words your coworkers would use to describe you?
- Helpful, accurate, inquisitive
What is your favorite thing about your current job/role?
- The variety of tasks but also the specific problems fashion companies face (f.e. forecasting fashion).
What sort of duties do you have at work?
- The most important one is making sure correct data gets served in time to users. This means building data pipelines (ETL). Databricks is our most important tool.
- Further I am responsible for keeping our platform/architecture future proof and reliable. This is not only about tools/tech but also about data design.
- It's crazy how fast things evolve in the data world.
Do you have any mentors in your professional life?
- No, but I do have people from which I learned a lot even though I never met them:
- Andrew Ng, Holden Karau, mathematicalmonk (find him on youtube) and basically all the people at AMPLab who got me into big data (with special thanks to Matei Zaharia).
How long have you been using Databricks? And the Databricks Community?
- I have been using Databricks since 2018 I think (when it was released on Azure), but worked with Spark before that.
- I joined the Databricks Community the moment it went live. A strong community is key in moving forward. I am really glad to see the Databricks Community is growing and I hope to see new names on the Top Contributor list!
Do you have a favorite Databricks feature? Something that makes your life a lot easier? Or more interesting?
- No doubt Delta Lake! But also auto-scaling clusters and Repos.
Is there a Databricks feature you want to see in the future?
- Tight IDE integration and more attention to graph processing.
Tell us about your favorite hobby
- I play the guitar for over 30 years and still aim to improve my play.
- I am part of a band that plays 80s music.
