Tell me about yourself
- Databases throughout my career
- Created BI Tools from whatever software is available
- Reduce Manual Work
- Free up employees to do important work
- Reduce inaccuracy introduced through manual processes
- Really enjoy making tools for the business that make their lives easier.
Safety message of the day
- Attentive and defensive driving
- Distracted, careless and wreckless drivers
- Especially when raining
What does safety mean in an office setting?
- Feeling comfortable being yourself while professional
- Not having to feel on guard because of a toxic work environment
- Freeing you up to just focus on doing excellent work
What does safety mean to you in general?
- Practicing prevention as a means of reducing risk and encouraging safety
- For example, preventive medical screenings, preventive dental care, eating healthy, being active. All as a means to move through life physically capable and mentally healthy.
How do you contribute to safety?
- Honestly, treat others as I would like to be treated. It’s as simple as that.
Share a team accomplishment
- Worked heavily with a Abby and Chris on the development of the WA Power App.
- Made myself readily available for questions from both to keep the project moving forward
- Answered questions such as what is possible in Power Apps
- Collaborated in a safe and nonjudgemental way to create the best product possible for the business
Database development accomplishment story 1
Situation
1. Sole owner of existing datamart in SQL Server
2. Responsible for maintenance and continued development
3. Contains long and complex stored procedures that cross multiple databases:
Staging
Transformation
Production
Obstacle
1. When a production enterprise wide job failed all eyes were on you to fix it quickly
2. There was no documentation and very few comments
Action
1. Extract text of stored procedures, put them in a text editor and searched for key words such as
Insert
Update
Delete
Truncate
2. These were pieces of code that I needed to
Find quickly
Fully understand
Alter carefully
since they would alter the data
3. Created visio diagrams that mapped out
Stored procedures
Tables altered
this provided a quick reference and allowed me to feel comfortable making changes as I know where all actionable code was
Result
1. Reduced operational risk through:
-Faster recovery
-Reducing interruption to business operations
2. Increased stakeholder confidence through:
-Swift and accurate fixes.
3. Enabled faster and more cost-effective maintenance using:
-Documented processes and visual maps.
Database development Accomplishment Story 2
Situation
1. Business identifies data they need integrated into the SQL Server datamart for proper analysis and reporting.
Obstacle
1. The data is not in a location or platform that makes it easy to integrate into the datamart.
2. The data comes from enterprise applications that were never meant to work together so there are no primary keys to join the data
Action
1. Identify the correct technique to bring the data in.
-SSIS package creation needed with Excel source?
-SSIS package creation needed with Teradata source?
-Server link to another SQL Server database needed?
-Server link to an Oracle database needed?
2. Work with the business to come up with logic I can translate to technical specs that will allow the data from different applications to be joined.
-Explain to the business the level of accuracy that can be achieved
-Create stored procedures necessary to transform the data and bring it in to tables in the database.
Result
1. The business will have access to data that was previously not readily available to
-Identify key business insights
-Make informed, strategic, and swift decisions.
Power Apps Accomplishment Story 1
Situation
1. Determined the number of objects needed per table for the new WA App would be 37.
Obstacle
1. 10 tables needed.
2. 37 objects per table for 370 total to maintain and troubleshoot.
3. Unique names are required making code writing and searching unweildy.
4. ~20 properties per object
-Multiple properties can ontain code that needs to be adjusted
-Some of the code may be very complex
-Assuming, conservatively, 4 properties per object that is 1480 properties ( 4 x 370) to maintain and troubleshoot.
Action
1. Upskilled quickly on components, an advanced power app technique, due to prior experience developing business intelligence tools.
2. Created core components, re-useable collections of objects, and used them almost exclusively in the new app.
Result
By employing reuseable components I was able to:
1. Reduce development and troubleshooting cycle-time by 75%
2. Mitigate operational risk by centralizing complex logic
3. Provide standardized processes across the user experience
Power Apps Accomplishment Story 2
Situation
1. Users would like the home page of the PGE ticketing app to function more intuitively, like common web pages. For example:
-Change column order
-Show/Hide columns
-Filter any column
-Clear individual column filters
-Clear ALL applied filters
-Sort each column
-Have column order and visibility settings saved for when they come into the app next time.
Obstacle
2. There is limited “out of the box” capability in Power Apps to create the desired functionality
Action
1. Came up with creative solutions in Power Apps due to advanced understanding and combining multiple techniques to simulate the desired functionality.
Result
1. Increased BI tool adoption through:
More user friendly and inuitive design
2. Lowered training overhead by using common design concepts
3. Increased user productivity through an intuitive, self-service interface
Exhibiting customer focus
- Understand their needs
- Understand the spectrum of user capabilities
- Build with these in mind
- Prioritize ease of use
- Results in wide adoption of the tool
Questions for interviewers
- Now that two teams are being combined, how do you see the new combined team functioning?
- I understand there is another team under your umbrella, what is their function?
What does a good team culture look like to you?
- Not gate keeping knowledge to seem more important or less despensible
- Feeling comfortable expressing ideas
- Exercising humility and leaving egos at the door
- Knowing each team member will have our back
- Helping each other problem solve when we need an extra pair of eyes
- Encouraging each other when needed
- Not letting frustrations show outwardly during stressful situations
- Apologizing if you have a human moment and get snappy with a team member during stressful situations
- Treating each other with dignity and respect
How do you exhibit flexibility/agility?
- I assume there will be changes on EVERY project
- I roll with the punches
- I make sure I confirm priority adjustments
- I make sure the business understands
- The deadline will change or
- They need to remove another item to keep the same deadline
How do you go about problem solving?
Overall approach
My portfolio of experience give me a large body of knowledge to call on to determine the most logical place to start troubleshooting. I start there and then keep refining. For example
Database Job Failure
1. Did data come into the staging tables at all
2. Deconstruct the stored procedure most likely to cause the error.
For example, if it is loan data that has issues I’m not going to look at the stored procedures that relates to employees.
3. Trace the stored procedure from staging database to transformation database to production database quantifying results along the way, such as row counts.
4. Isolate where the issue is
Power Apps
1. Put your cursor in the table name contained in a property to see a preview of the data as it comes into power apps below.
-You may find that instead of the user friendly name of the field it is invoking the system name such as schema_tablename.
-In some parts of Power Apps the user friendly name is required and in other parts the system name is needed.
2. Output a variable to a label so you can see how the variable changes based on the line of code you write.
3. Create a data table with a collection as the source
4. See how the data in the table changes as you make changes to the code that creates the collection.
Database accomplishments stories
- Failed job
- New data requested
Power Apps accomplishment stories
- Components
- Intuitive design like web page
