Snowflake Summit 2023

Snowflake Summit 2023

This was my second consecutive year at the Snowflake Summit in Las Vegas. While the hot topic last year was data mesh and all sessions about data mesh sold out, this year data mesh was like last year's snow. Now the running theme is Generative AI and LLMs. The good news is that attendees were able to pre-book sessions and many sessions were also recorded so that I didn't miss any of the buzz around these topics. What an exciting Summit it was! So many announcements! Here are some of my favorites: Dynamic Tables. No more streams and tasks. Just write your SQL and Snowflake takes care of the rest, in some ways similar to materialized views, but with less restrictions about the types of queries you can use. Native Applications. Write your application and distribute it via the Snowflake Marketplace. I built a simple app and wrote a blog post about it: Maintaining a Mapping Table with a Snowflake Native App. ...
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What the Snowflake Community Means to Me—and My Career

What the Snowflake Community Means to Me—and My Career

I was recently interviewed for the Snowflake blog where I discussed the benefits of being an active member of the Snowflake Community, how the community has helped me grow into my role as a Snowflake DataSuperhero and how it can be of use to anyone looking for hands-on Snowflake resources. With respect to the usefulness of the Snowflake community I was quoted as saying “Snowflake offers a lot of great technical documentation, but it’s useful that there’s so much material out there from the Snowflake community around personal case studies and how other people are implementing specific features.” Read the full article here....
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I’m a Snowflake Data Superhero!

I’m a Snowflake Data Superhero!

I’m so excited about becoming a Snowflake Data Superhero! I first learned about the Superhero program from Kent Graziano’s blog more than a year ago and I immediately thought it would be cool to be a member of this group. At the time, I was still very much a beginner with Snowflake and I knew I had to become more involved if I wanted to join the Superhero program. Compared with other popular on-prem data platforms that have been on the market for decades, Snowflake as a cloud data platform is relatively younger which means that there still aren’t vast knowledge bases of information available to users and developers of the platform. There aren’t many experts out there answering questions, writing blogs, creating tutorials or YouTube videos. This is where Snowflake Data Superheroes come in. We (yes, I can use the pronoun “we” now since I have been officially welcomed to the club) are here to fill the gap. I have been...
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Workshop: Agile planning in practice (Together in Excellence 2020 conference)

Workshop: Agile planning in practice (Together in Excellence 2020 conference)

One of the myths about agile is that in agile there is no planning. This myth probably stems from comparison with waterfall approaches, where detailed up-front planning is the norm. In agile, there is still a need to plan over a long period of time, commit to a completion date, plan resources, and align the product to a strategic vision. But instead of detailed planning at the beginning, agile planning is spread throughout the entire development process, and it involves all team members, not just one individual who is the designated project manager. Agile planning and estimation breaks down development into small units which can deliver value to a customer. Teams plan for what they can accomplish to satisfy a customer in a short period of time. Some examples of agile planning are during daily standups, during sprint planning meetings and during release planning. In this workshop, delivered at the Together in Excellence 2020 conference, we covered topics related to agile planning...
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Planning for project unknowns

Planning for project unknowns

Project contingency planning is among the least understood topics related to project management. This is probably due to the fact that contingency deals with the unknown. How do we plan for something that might happen but we don't even know what that might be? And how much will it cost us if it does happen? While risk management is a related area that deals with the unknown, at least in risk management we start by making a list of all the possible scenarios that can go wrong that we can think of. And if we can imagine a negative scenario, then we can estimate what it would cost if it manifested. On the other hand, contingency planning is to cover everything else that we haven't thought of as a risk but that still might happen. The June 2016 issue of PM Network magazine has an article about contingency planning and once again they reached out to project management practitioners for their input. I was...
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IDC Big Data & Business Analytics Forum 2014

IDC Big Data & Business Analytics Forum 2014

Dealing with today’s huge amounts of data requires analytics. IDC’s recent Big Data and Business Analytics forum was all about connecting data and analytics. The organizers of the event addressed questions such as: what are the forces behind the explosion within the digital universe? Technology has certainly helped, by driving down the cost of creating, capturing, managing, and storing information to a sixth of what it was in 2005. The real impetus, nonetheless, is financial. Since 2005, investments in the digital universe among enterprises have expanded some 50% to $4 trillion – money spent on hardware, software, services, and staff, ultimately, to generate revenue. I was one of the speakers at the event. My presentation Quick results in the conversion of large amounts of data into business information was about agile approaches in the implementation of solutions for data analysis, business solutions in real time and predicting the likelihood of business events. The magazine MonitorPro wrote about me in the February 2014...
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Being more productive on projects

Being more productive on projects

Once again I was invited to participate in PMI's publication PM Network, this time in their June 2013 issue. I contributed tips about how to be more productive on projects. The article lists ten miscellaneous tips for project managers. One of them was mine, about resolving minor issues by clearing the air via telephone call rather than entering a lengthy email correspondence: “Whenever I detect an undertone such as sarcasm or anger in an email, I never respond by email. I usually telephone the sender and ask him or her to clarify, which allows me to get a clearer understanding of his or her motives. We can resolve minor issues in passing, not having to explain them in lengthy emails.” In my project management experience, I find it much more efficient to pick up the telephone and call someone when there is an issue to be resolved, a matter to be settled or something ambiguous to be clarified rather than firing off an email. By...
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Sex discrimination in IT? I don’t think so!

Sex discrimination in IT? I don’t think so!

In the February issue of PM Network magazine you can read an interview with me about my views on sex discrimination in IT. The article is written as a debate between two project managers with opposing views. My opinion is that based on my experience there is no sex discrimination in IT. Who knows whether my opinion might be different had I been exposed to different experiences? My co-interviewee in the article (whom I never actually met because the article was composed through several e-mail exchanges) says that I was lucky that I always managed to work in environments without sex discrimination. Her opinion made me wonder whether this may be because I always worked in environments where they hired women in IT - after all, they hired me - which shows that they had nothing against women in the first place. I've worked both in places where I was one of a handful of women in predominantly male environments as well...
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5 X 5 About project management

5 X 5 About project management

We have asked 5 questions to 5 Organizational Department Heads from different companies about project management. I was interviewed in the SAS AR Newsletter about project management. The last question was on a less serious note and asked what profession is most closely related to project management. My answer was what I always say in such situations: managing a project is often like parenting teenage children. You can't make them do anything, you can only motivate them. SAS AR Newsletter, April 2011  ...
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Jan Korevaar Outstanding Paper Award

Jan Korevaar Outstanding Paper Award

I was the recipient of the 2006 Jan Korevaar Outstanding Paper Award at the 5th ICEC World Congress, held in Ljubljana, Slovenia in May 2006. The title of my paper was Implementing Earned Value Management on IT Projects. The International Cost Engineering Council initiated the Jan Korevaar Outstanding Paper Award to recognize the paper chosen by Congress delegates through their evaluations as the outstanding paper presented at each International Cost Engineering Congress. The award was created in memory of Jan Korevaar, Executive Director of the Dutch Association of Cost Engineers and Assistant Secretary of ICEC for many years....
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