Neil A.

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT NEIL A.

Nothing is as satisfying as solving a problem. You know: the ones that have you banging your head (gently) against the wall. But then, through deep thought and - let\'s be honest - a lot of trial and error, suddenly you can see a way forward. That\'s why I enjoy data engineering so much: I get to design and build solutions in the cloud to solve the problem of moving data from over there to over here, a bit like how a civil engineer might construct a bridge. Sometimes the data throws you a curveball - this primary key shouldn\'t be null, should it- or suddenly you have to handle 10x the normal amount of data for some inexplicable reason. But that\'s the fun of it all: designing, building, validating, querying, presenting - it\'s all tremendously varied and interesting.My sandbox is AWS. I find their technology fascinating: constantly evolving, yet the components can be linked together like a Rube Goldberg machine to serve data where it needs to be. I\'ve specialised in AWS technologies over the last 6 years, gaining deep knowledge of quite a spread of services through consulting and the 7 AWS certifications I\'ve achieved so far (just 5 more to go!). I\'ve become really rather good at it, architecting and building whole data platforms by myself. Like many tech nerds, I\'m captivated by the influx of AI in the modern world, and especially how cloud providers like AWS are embracing and making it a core part of their strategy. I love to research topics like this for my blog, experimenting and poring over documentation to really understand how things work because, after all:Nothing is as satisfying as solving a problem.