Featured Member Interview - January 2023
Uma Maheswara Rao D - @UmaMahesh ⭐️
Community nickname: UmaMahesh
Pronouns: He/Him
Company: Maersk
Job Title: Associate Data Engineer
Databricks Certifications Completed:
Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate
Academy Accreditation - Databricks Lakehouse Fundamentals
Could you give a brief description of your professional journey to date?
I graduated in 2019 and joined a reputed firm as a Data Engineer where I was fortunate enough to work with one of the largest supply chain companies as a client. I often had to work with Databricks and Azure Cloud services, which occupied most of my daily work activities. After 2 years, in 2021, I switched to my current organization where I started to work with the data from the biggest shipping company. Here, I was working with the Service Delivery Team where our use case is to provide organizational insights to improve the customer satisfaction by reducing the transportation delays, determining better optimized routes, ports etc. Generally, my work involves using ADB, ADF & other Azure services, Visualization tools like PowerBI and cube modeling.
What is your favorite thing about your current job/role?
In my role as a Data Engineer, I have the opportunity to work with a large amount of data to build features that business users can use to make decisions/ analyze data.
Doing so, there would also be ample learning opportunities to further improve the existing datasets/ reports by working on the challenges/ shortcomings of data limitations, data quality etc.
What are three words your coworkers would use to describe you?
Fun, Reliable and Adaptable.
Do you have any mentors in your professional life?
I was lucky enough to be blessed with mentors in each leg of my professional career. Shankar Menon, Pavan M in my previous organization and Arjun S, Aravind P in my current organization. My greatest learning from them is experimenting, making mistakes, and evolving. They also guided and supported me personally and professionally.
When and why did you start using Databricks?
As part of the organizational training offered to us, I opened the Databricks portal for the first time in June 2019. Since then, Databricks has become an integral part of my daily professional activities.
Do you have a favorite Databricks feature? Something that makes your life a lot easier? Or more interesting?
If you ever need to explore previous versions of your code, the Databricks revision history feature is an incredible tool. I use it a lot, both when I create ad hoc notebooks and when there are multiple people editing the same notebook. It's also incredibly useful when you want to see all the changes that were made in a notebook but don't want or need to revert back to an old version.
Is there a Databricks feature you want to see in the future?
Besides the regular features planned in the roadmap, I would like to see a feature where we could interact directly with the dataframe cell output in the output frame. As with bringing Excel features to Databricks, this is a limited use case, but will still be a useful feature.
When and why did you start using Databricks Community?
In order to improve the performance of a use case, I started using the Community. As I searched through the answers to the already answered questions, I found my answer which prompted me to help the Community back by answering questions I knew about. This is similar to the concept of growing together through mutual help.
What’s your favorite thing about being in the Databricks Community?
As users with varying levels of experience take part in a community discussion, they present a variety of options. This allows us to understand the thought process of various users, and to incorporate their ideas into our own use cases.
Pivoting a little: What’s your favorite hobby?
Spending time with my family is one of my favorite things to do. I also enjoy going on long bicycle rides.
Where do you see yourself in 3 years?
I would like to see myself as a dependable Data Engineer & Technical enthusiast with a significant amount of experience and skills to back me up.
Social Media Handle:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dumr/
Thank you for sharing a bit about your life and professional journey, and for letting us 'take a piece of greatness' from you @Uma Maheswara Rao Desula 😊
Let Uma know what questions you have for him below!
