Taras Kloba's data engineering blog

My Favorite Books of 2022

Hello and welcome to my blog!

Today, I want to share with you my top 10 books that I listened to this year. These books are not directly related to my work, but rather are for personal development and enjoyment. I’m an avid reader and love to listen to books while I’m doing routine work. Listening to books helps me make the most of my time and keeps my mind engaged. I usually listen to about 15 hours of books per month, which allows me to get through 2-3 books. I use the Audible app for all my book listening and have been really happy with the selection and service they provide.

The opening for me of this year was “A Man Called Ove” by Fredrik Backman, and I am thankful to Mykola Dzhus for recommending this author. In this year-end summary, I wanted to share my top 10 books of the year, along with some thoughts and quotes from each one, in order of my personal preference for them:

  1. “Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service” by Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal: “The Mossad is constantly at the forefront of... Read More

The Power BI Marathon in 2022

Big Data & Analytics Competence Development Team at SoftServe always aims to deliver the best solutions and opportunities. The Big Data Power BI Marathon was not an exception. What intended to be a Power BI Marathon for Ukrainians who fled the war turned into the Marathon with both international speakers and audience. The Marathon was a perfect combination of expertise, knowledge, practice, and drive. What made it so special?

Easy. Firstly, the pool of speakers was full of A-list Power BI experts. Namely:

André Melancia

Developer, DBA, and Microsoft Certified Trainer

Andrey Nikolov

Co-founder of FrameStory SoftWare

Anna Voropaieva

Senior BI Engineer at SoftServe

Ásgeir Gunnarsson

Owner of North Insights... Read More

Top 8 Data Engineering certifications to find a job

My name is Taras Kloba, and I am a Big Data Competence Manager at SoftServe. Our recruiters regularly review the lists of newly certified professionals to find new potential candidates. There is no doubt that other large companies also use this approach. Thus, I have decided to prepare a list of in-demand certifications for 2022 that may help you get a job in the field of Data Engineering.

Let's consider the main advantages of hiring certified specialists from the perspective of service companies:

  • In most cases, customers of service companies do not require additional interviews when dealing with certified engineers as they trust professional certification.

  • IT companies that hire a certain number of certified employees have the opportunity to form a partnership with such giants as GCP, Microsoft Azure, and AWS.

  • A certified specialist who has a reasonable theoretical basis in combination with an appropriate working environment will be able to implement a project by applying best practices and market standards.

However, it is essential to remember that professional certification is not a "silver bullet" that guarantees being hired as soon as you have received the appropriate training and a certificate. It... Read More

How I became Microsoft Certified Data Analyst Associate: key tips

My name is Taras Kloba, and I am a Microsoft Certified Trainer with over 12 years of experience working with data. Recently, I’ve passed the DA-100: Analyzing Data with Microsoft Power BI exam and received a certificate confirming the title of Microsoft Data Analyst Associate. This certificate proves a certain level of competence of a data analysis specialist. Namely, a specialist of this level should understand data warehousing, data processing, visualization, preparation and transformation, design and construction of data models. After I shared the news about the certification on social media, many people started asking about the best approaches to exam preparation and the purpose of this certificate. That’s why I decided to share my experience.

WHY DID I DECIDE TO GET CERTIFIED?

There is an impressive report from Nigel Frank’s Career and Hiring Guide, according to which 48% of respondents say that their salary increased by an average of 19% after they received Microsoft Azure certification. Clearly, this can be a significant motivating factor for certification. What’s more, 55% of respondents say that this certification allowed them to test their skills in working with Azure products, and 49% of respondents add that the certificates became... Read More

Big Data conferences in 2022

What if we can have a single list of upcoming conferences and an opportunity to attend them? It would be a great way of learning more about Big Data and getting in touch with professionals who share the same passion as you. Moreover, it sounds like a nice opportunity to make friends and try your hand at presenting on a topic. Wouldn’t that be cool? So, we’ve composed a list of Big Data conferences in 2022.

MS Stage

International tech event on the Microsoft Technologies stack. Register when you are a Software developer, Test engineer, DevOps and/or SRE who uses C#, F#, Visual Basic, .NET, ASP.NET, Azure, Cosmos DB, SQL Server, WCF, Office365 or other Microsoft technologies.

The event is scheduled for April 1, 2022 and will be hosted online.

The registration is free. You will get access to the stream, conference record, and presentations of speakers. Go to the website of the event to register and get acquainted with program and speakers.

Kafka Summit London 2022

Kafka Summit is the premier event for developers, architects, data engineers, DevOps professionals, and anyone else who wants to learn about streaming data. It... Read More