Try new tech

As someone who works in data, you need to keep track of the technologies. Things like Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Fabric, Qlik, S3, ADF, Fivetran, Matillion, Dataiku, Collibra, etc. Sometimes I heard people said "I don't have access". That is no excuse. You can try almost any technology for free. All vendors are competing for our attention. Whether you are a developer, an analyst, an architect or a consultant, all technology providers want you to know them. Whether they work in databases, data integration or data management, they all want you to try their products. All you need to do is go to their websites, like Snowflake.com, Databricks.com, Qlik.com, Dataiku.com, Tableau.com and click on Try for Free. They all have free trial.

Be careful when you want to try out Looker (it's like Power BI and Tableau, from Google). You need to disable the API otherwise you could be charged with thousands of dollars. If this happens contact their customer service asap and they will be able to reverse that charge out.

There is no excuse for not trying out new technologies. We are not in electrical engineering, nor construction industry, where the technologies move at glacier pace. We are in the information technology, where things move so quickly that you if blink you'll miss it. People who work in AI is more agile. They learn new things all the time. People working in data however tend to move at glacier pace. Still SQL, still database, still SSIS, just like 10 years ago. That's not how things work in our industry. If you don't completely change your skills every 5 years, you'll be out of your job.

So try the new techs. You, yes you, get to pick the tech. That's a good thing right? What more do you want? It's free, and you get the choose what you like. If you work in data, as a developer, and you can't code in Python yet, that must be the number one thing on your list. Today is the day of AI, and every company in every sector is building AI apps, in ... guess what? Yup, in Python. Checkout these 3 sites where you can learn Python for free: learnpython.org, python.land/python-tutorial, developers.google.com/edu/python.

If you are an architect, and you know almost nothing about things in AWS or Azure, you need to familiar yourself with them pronto. For Azure at least ADF, Fabric, ADLS, ADO, VM, Cosmos, API. And for AWS: S3, Glue, RDS, EC2, Lambda, Redshift, Aurora. There are literally hundreds of services in these platforms, which would take months to get your hands into. So no one can do that. You need to limit yourself to the top three. Then get the top three on the other cloud platform: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud too.

If you are a data consultant, and you know next to nothing about Snowflake, Databricks, Matillion, Fivetran, Collibra, Ataccama, CrowdStrike, then you need to set aside one weekend asap to check them out. Or in between your meetings with clients. Consultants are worth of what they know. So if your knowledge about technologies is 5 years old, you desperately need to update yourself. And the best way to learn is by doing not by reading. Try them out. Go to their websites and then click that big green button that says "Try for free". Find out their architecture (hopefully SaaS), their data security, data governance, and how to use them. Yes, data security. If you work in data and only focusing on data loading or data governance, that's not on! You also need to know about data security. Authentication, threat detection, cyber attack and data breach. That's why I mentioned CrowdStrike. And guess what? They have free trial too! So what are you waiting for? Stop reading this and get stuck in with the new techs. Remember: you get to pick what you like, and you can try them all for free...

Keep learning!