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 using Snowflake for about two years now and I’m still learning all the details so I can hardly claim to be an expert. However, with my many years of experience with legacy data platforms, learning Snowflake does not present a steep learning curve and I’m able to quickly contrast how a feature is implemented in Snowflake as compared to other platforms. Writing about it in a magazine article or explaining a feature in a blog post comes as second nature to me since I have been doing that for years and hopefully I will be able to contribute much more content related to Snowflake in the future.
Answering questions on StackOverflow or in the Snowflake Community is a different matter and I want to elaborate here. It is expected from Snowflake Data Superheroes that we answer questions and I completely agree that new users of Snowflake should get prompt support when they ask questions on various forums. However, what I found out is that there is no shortage of individuals who answer questions on forums. In fact, I found that there is actually a shortage of questions.
Whenever I head to StackOverflow, most of the questions tagged [snowflake-cloud-data-platform] that have been asked already have an answer as well. If I want to contribute, my best bet is when I chance upon a question that has been asked a few minutes ago and still has no answer. But even then, chances are that by the time I finish writing my answer, another answer has already popped up in the meantime. As a rule, I never write an answer off the top of my head. I always provide a reference to the documentation if relevant and I always test a SQL statement or Snowflake command on Snowflake first before posting my answer. That is why my answers often take longer to compose and I don’t want to compromise the quality of my answers by entering a competition on who will be first to post an answer, regardless of whether it contains mistakes or, what I have also noticed with SQL statements, have been written with a different database in mind, missing a crucial nuance in Snowflake syntax.
I have accumulated a fair number of answers since I started participating on StackOverflow, but this was mostly because I was actively looking for questions so that I could answer them. In my opinion, this somewhat defeats the purpose of being helpful to the community when the motivation is to constantly look for questions so that I can score points for the number of answers I provide rather than going there to help those who are waiting for an answer.
But anyway, I’m here now and eager to live up to my Snowflake Data Superhero status, which challenges me with a greater responsibility to provide valuable content to the Snowflake community.