Marcos’ story: Reaching my full potential

I’m Marcos, a Brazilian Data Engineer working with Sparkle who lives by the lines: I may not reach the clouds, but simply by trying, I still leave the ground. I came up with it in Portuguese a long time ago, so it’s hard to make it have the precise meaning in English and to be as poetic. 

Before Sparkle, I worked for 3 years on the same data warehouse project for a company in Tallinn. Prior to this, I was in Brazil finishing my Physics degree and working simultaneously on a diverse range of projects such as Game and Web Development. I was lucky enough to get a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to visit Estonia and quickly landed a job while traveling and by chance was introduced to the data-warehouse team.

I always considered myself someone curious and always had a passion to help people and share my knowledge. As a young engineer starting his career, I never wanted my knowledge base to become stagnant and I was looking for an opportunity to continually grow.

Although most subjects don’t express a clear way of optimizing their learning process, 3 years at the same custom Postgres Data Warehouse was clearly not the shortest path. It was just at this moment I met Pieter, a super engaging and fun consultant at Sparkle.

Consultancy requires a lot of advising clients about the best solutions and practices that suit their needs, this went very well with my interest in helping people by transferring my knowledge in a professional, fun, and meaningful way. For being the best resource for a client you must know as many different solutions as possible and have the flexibility to leverage previous experience to assist, and I had the feeling that Sparkle would be the perfect place for upskilling myself and becoming a confident consultant. (Spoiler alert, it was just the place!)

The idea of participating in multiple Data Warehouse projects, being able to test different approaches and build solutions over and over again for different clients, was perfect, that’s how Sparkle sparkled to me.

It didn’t stop there when I joined I came to an environment full of experienced and engaging people, people who are interested in your experiences, not your ability to solve meaningless puzzles, a place where good old experiences and personal connections make the difference. Sparkle did not disappoint!

I started right away on a project with a big client, Atlas Copco, where we were doing a massive migration from QlikView to Microsoft Power BI, my dream of working with Microsoft tech stack was close to being achieved. By the end of the second week, I had already learned so much! Four months later, at the time I’m writing this article I feel empowered to help everyone around me with the knowledge I have gained about DAX and Azure. The possibilities with Sparkle are endless and exciting, and that’s how I’m reaching the clouds by just trying to be the most reliable advisor to the people around me.

Sparkle is the perfect environment for reaching your full potential, being surrounded by so many experienced and kind people, with very up-to-date technologies and standards, and having opportunities of working on so many different projects, gives you all you need to always keep learning hands-on.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marcos Defina

Marcos Defina

Data Engineer

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