Switching Jobs and my first experiences at GDP
By Rob Litjens
As some of you know I decided to move teams within Rabobank. This is something I have been working on for a long time. In my life as a SQL Platform engineer (automating the full stack of SQL Server deployments in the bank), I started to gain interest in the vision of their product Trident (yes.. Back in those days).
The product is now named Fabric.
For Rabobank I went to Seattle to attend SQL PASS Community. I suspected that at that time SQL2022 would be announced, I received litle signs of this. Amongst the announcement of SQL2022, they also announced the preview of a Data SAAS solutions which would and could change the world: Trident. With Trident in my mind i planned various sessions about SQL Pass 2022 and Trident. During a precon workshop from Bob Ward he showed something that integrates the on premise with Cloud and how you could give access to on premise servers using Azure Active Directory: Purview. At that time it was clear for me that the future of data will be shared between the options we have. There will always be an on premise dataworld, also Cloud services will have various offerings which will be there. And now, the SAAS solutions will be available too. For every data need there is a data solution.
Keeping the last sentence in my mind, I started to follow things around Fabric and Purview. This resulted in trainings at Microsoft Learn, reading blogs from MVP’s like Kevin Chant, Nikola Ilic, went to Data saturdays and also BBQ sessions. In september 2023 I was asked to speak in Oslo at a data conference. Coincidently the day before that group organized a workshop on Fabric. I decided to do that workshop give by CAT team members. The workshop really fullfilled the questions I had about it. At that time it was still not GA, but in public preview.
In the early 2024 the Dutch Fabric User group was formed between Mark Lelijveld, Kevin Chant and Erwin de Kreuk. When I saw the invite for the first meeting being held in February 2024, I knew it. For me Fabric is part of the future. Up till now I went to all the meetings.
On my search for where Fabric would land in Rabobank, I found Sebastiaan Meloen. During the calls I had with Sebastiaan I found out that they were looking for quite some people. I discussed this with him, but also with my current/previous IT lead Nick Crouse. Nick was able to talk to the IT lead on GDP site Luc Hartering. After a first meeting with Sebastiaan on what that Area does, I had a meeting with Luc if I would be a fit. After this a third meeting with Angelo Kralis (Scrum Master) and Mehrdad Farnia was organised. The last meeting I had was with Thijs ter Horst and Nithin Janardhanan was set up. This was just before the holidays and ran in a timeframe of one few (yes 2) weeks.
I started on October first as full time engineer for that team. The weeks before I already joined the team part time to learn a bit already. That worked great. It is a benefit of being an internal employee at an Enterprise. The openness of all teammembers was astonishing…
Together with me, another colleague started: Saravanan Ganasan. He is fully new to the bank
Because October first is in the middle of a sprint, onboarding will be done over two sprints. Part of the onboarding is talking to all members of the team. Onboarding is something that goes smoothly, even when you are not job hopping internally, like me. Every team member is keen on getting to know me or my colleague, meetings about the various items in my new team are shared in different knowledge transfers.
During my first days, I did learn a lot already. Also, I solved some smaller things. There was a change required in the VNET gateways which we maintain. It was minor, we needed to add a Fabric F4 capacity. This change brought me in an discussion with antother architect of the team: Anyesh Srivastava. He is somehow managing Fabric.
Another thing that happened in the first week was Fabric Friday, organized by the Data Saturday Holland crew. Due to sad circumstances (my father in law (not log analytics workspace) passed away), I could not join as a volunteer. This caused a lot of unwanted but needed “free time” in the weeks after, also at work.
At the end of november things seem to turn back to normal. Within Rabobank the bi-yearly Engineering week is organized. This time I am not part of the speaker community. Reason is what you can read above here. Next to the Engineering Week my team found the need for a Hackathon. We need to transform a so called API in a asynchronous service. I organized that day during the Engineering week so that we could do some EW keynotes. We explored a few options in here. One was to use the Service Bus in Azure, the other one was about creting a durable function. We ended up doing the latter. Durable functions do have an advantage to service bus when it comes on what we as engineers need to do. Also fun part of this was that we found out that writing the code in Powershell can do the trick, but also C#. We do not need Python anymore. For us, it is dificult to find Python Infrastructural programmers. Pretty sure that if you know one, you can find a job at Rabobank easily.
If you also want to join our internal sessions, Rabobank has room for people to join. Go to Vacatures bij Rabobank - Rabobank to find out if there is something you like. If there is nothing you like, you could set a job alert.
Lets see what happens in the next few weeks…