Leuven
A couple of weeks ago, I was back in Leuven for my second hackathon at the DataCamp office. The contrast with the first time was striking. Last April, I struggled to keep up and spent most of my time trying to understand what was going on. This time, I came in with ideas, contributed to the discussions, and built something I was proud of. It is one thing to be told you are improving. It is another thing to feel it.
At work, the past few months have been intense in the best way. I have been working on a major rebuild of the Learn Mart -creating metrics tables for Learn Product, NPS, Certifications, and Competitions. It is the most complex technical work I have done so far, and it has pushed me to get much better at dbt and SQL. I have also been building Looker explores and dashboards, migrating old Metabase dashboards to Looker, and I just finished a Dashboard to track B2B Activity.
In December, we launched Looker across the company. Watching teammates outside the data team open the dashboards I had been working on was a small but very rewarding moment.
On top of that, I continue doing sales calls in Spanish which is always a nice change of pace from the analytical work. It is cool that my background is useful in ways I did not expect when I started this path.
Looking back, the distance between where I was and where I am now is becoming more visible. The hackathon was the clearest proof of that. Same city, same office, very different experience.
I am grateful for every challenge that has pushed me forward and for every teammate who has helped me along the way.