Engineering Impact: Leveraging Insights from Snowflake Summit 2024 to Drive Client Success and Employee Growth

At Blankfactor, our commitment to excellence is deeply rooted in our dedication to creating client impact and investing in employee development. Recently Neli Petkova , a Data Engineer, and Stefan Stanev a Data Engineering Lead, from Blankfactor's Data team, had the privilege of attending the 2024 Snowflake Summit in San Francisco, a pivotal event in the data industry. This experience highlighted our relentless pursuit of staying ahead in the ever-evolving data landscape. We proudly have a team of over 50 Data Engineers who drive impactful solutions for some of the world's leading brands across Europe, Latin America, and the USA.

Meet Neli and Stefan and read what they share about their experience at the summit.

About Neli: Having lived in Vienna, Austria for six years, she completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Business Informatics and began her career in IT. Recognizing the burgeoning career opportunities in her home country, Neli returned to Sofia, Bulgaria, where she learned about Blankfactor through Dimitar Shukerski , a fellow weightlifting enthusiast and Senior DevOps Engineer at Blankfactor. Dimitar’s high praise for our company and the data practice, led by the renowned Nikolay Nyagolov , convinced Neli to apply for an open position. Today, three months after joining Blankfactor, she continues to learn new skills, acquire globally recognized accreditations, and remains highly motivated and optimistic about her career growth.

About Stefan: He has amassed over 25 years in the IT sector, encompassing multiple generations of technology. Starting as a full-stack software engineer, his career path eventually specialized in data engineering, a field he developed a passion for due to its capacity to process and derive insights from data. From the inception of Blankfactor's Data Practice, he has been instrumental in shaping its trajectory and success. Currently serving as the Data Engineering Lead, he applies his extensive experience to drive innovation and deliver impactful solutions tailored to clients' evolving needs. His journey exemplifies a lifelong commitment to remaining at the forefront of technological advancements in data engineering, ensuring consistent excellence in the field.

What was your initial reaction when you found out you were selected to attend Snowflake 2024 in San Francisco?

Neli: When I found out I was selected to attend Snowflake 2024 in San Francisco, it felt like a dream come true. Knowing I would be in Silicon Valley, the heart of innovation and home to giants like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter, for an international AI data cloud conference was overwhelming. Reflecting on my excitement, I realized how fortunate I am to be inspired by my career and driven by continuous learning and improvement."

Stefan: To attend an event of this type is truly an excitement. It was an incredible opportunity to network with industry leaders, explore cutting-edge technologies, and gain insights that would directly benefit our team's projects at Blankfactor as well as my professional development.

Can you describe the main focus of Snowflake 2024 and what you were most excited to learn about?

Hearing about the latest developments in Snowflake firsthand from the experts was incredibly exciting for both of us. We strategized to make the most of our time at the summit, focusing on targeted sessions that aligned with our interests: Neli delved into hands-on labs exploring Snowflake's new AI and ML capabilities, while Stefan deep-dived into platform performance and query optimization techniques. Together, our collaboration proved invaluable.

Overall, the motto of this year's summit was “AI for everyone” and all new features were somehow connected to AI & ML, enabling Snowflake users to build and run AI & ML models at any level of expertise. To demonstrate that, a random participant from the audience was called to the stage to build a chatbot, that answers questions based on a given document library. Alicia created the chatbot using the zero-code AI / ML studio (a brand new feature released at the summit) in less time than the speaker’s food needed to heat in the microwave, although she stated in the beginning, that she had logged into Snowflake only a few times before that. How about that?!

What was your experience like attending an international conference of this caliber?

The scale of the summit and the level of organization was unthinkable. Everything down to the very last detail was perfectly well thought out - sessions schedule, staff carrying instruction signs, lunch, after-party, and networking events, spectacular live demos and dramatic keynote speeches, hosted and attended by big names in the data and cloud industry like the co-founder of Snowflake (Beno?t Dageville), Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy and the NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang.A small example of how visionary this event was: the hands-on labs looked like silent discos because everyone was wearing headphones, that were transmitting the speaker’s presentation so that multiple practice sessions could take place in the same hall. You could even switch the input on your headphones and hear what is happening in the lab next door, just like in a silent disco, where you can listen to different music styles all in the same room.

How do you think the insights and knowledge gained from Snowflake Summit? 2024 will benefit our team and company?

The insights and knowledge gained from the summit are poised to significantly benefit our team and company in numerous ways.Being a technology company, we already integrate Snowflake features extensively into our projects. By staying current with the latest advancements showcased at the summit, we not only enhance our technical expertise but also strengthen our ability to deliver innovative solutions to our clients. The summit unveiled new horizons in AI, ML, and data analytics, empowering us to leverage these capabilities effectively. This opportunity will elevate the sophistication and effectiveness of our work, ensuring that we remain at the forefront of data-driven innovation in our industry.