For an Oracle consultant like myself with many years of experience building data warehouses and analytics solutions using the Oracle technology stack, I was naturally skeptical when I was asked to migrate an existing Oracle solution to Snowflake. Just like with any new technology, switching to Snowflake was a learning experience at first. But not…
I’m thrilled that I passed the SnowPro Core Certification exam! It was challenging because to be successful, exam takers must get at least 80% correct answers, which is quite high as compared to other industry exams (edit October 2021: the passing score has since been lowered). Before taking the exam, I wanted to be sure…
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…
People with limited knowledge of Hadoop sometimes ask me why do we need a new data storage technology? Why not stay with true and tested relational database technology? Why not indeed? In this post I will discuss the main differences between Hadoop and relational databases and some reasons why we want to use one versus…
Artificial Intelligence is becoming ubiquitous and nowadays anyone can get their hands on natural language processing technologies. One example of an application of natural language processing is a chatbot that provides customer support or augments call centers by supplying computer generated responses to customer questions. Building a chatbot that provides customer support on a website…
A widespread reason why projects don’t meet expectations is that they fulfill specifications to the dot but neglect to consider what the users really wanted. IT professionals typically argue that the application that they delivered does exactly what the requirements say. Unfortunately, requirements are sometimes ambiguous, incomplete, or just plain wrong. Sure, it is not…
In her book The Great ScrumMaster, author Zuzana Šochová reminds us that we may have lost our way in understanding the role of the ScrumMaster in agile. She describes the role using the #ScrumMasterWay concept which, according to the author, finally provides ScrumMasters the answer to their most common question: “What will the ScrumMaster do…
I recently completed a project where we modeled business processes for the Surveying and Mapping Authority in Slovenia and I co-authored and presented a paper about it at the Slovenian Society Informatika annual conference in April 2019. Some of the main benefits of this project that we outlined in the paper were: Business process modeling…
Recently I came across the IBM Data Science Professional Certificate set of courses on Coursera and I wanted to brush up my data science knowledge. I had taken a similar series of courses some six years ago and the first thing I noticed this time is how much the field has advanced. Six years ago,…
If you are involved with project management, chances are you have heard of the Chaos report published by the Standish group. The Chaos report delivers shocking results about the overwhelming failure of most projects. In the initial report that was published in 1994, just 16 percent of all projects were considered successful and this number…