About Me

This blog is written and maintained by Alistair Stoops. I am a tech consultant by trade, focused on all things data and analytics, with a keen interest in problem solving, cloud & virtualisation, and open source technology.

A lot of this blog will be focused on my professional learning and knowledge sharing, but I also plan to share some posts around the things I self-host; my NAS, firewall, local applications and services.

My professional journey

I have almost a decade of experience working in various data roles (science, engineering, architecture, analytics). I spent a couple of years in a data science role using SAS, and obtaining base and advanced certifications, before moving to a fraud analytics role for 18 months where my open-source journey began. Since then, I've been working as a consultant across a variety of data projects where my time has been quite evenly split amongst data engineering, analysis, and architecture. Though roles have varied, I've always been focused on helping clients improve their use of data in their business.

Around 2017-2018, my attention started to turn to cloud as many conversations I was involved in were starting to focus less on development tasks or individual data solution components and tools to broader end-to-end data architecture and migration. This was the point at which my professional interest in cloud data analytics started, but I didn't realise nor appreciate at the time that the years of tinkering on my own PCs and servers had built a solid foundation around understanding networking, firewalls, storage, containers, and much more (probably one for a blog post at a later date).

Over the next couple of years, and until 2021, I learned what I needed to for each project or role, building on my experience of data lake and warehouse solutions, integrating with cloud storage, developing pipelines in Spark (Cloudera Platform), and much more, but hadn't targeted any specific learning or deeper understanding.

It was in late 2021 that I set some new personal and professional goals. Since then, I've undertaken a number of Azure and AWS certifications, including the AWS data analytics specialty certification and data / analytics engineer certifications on both platforms, built some of my own interesting cloud projects (including this blog), and worked on some interesting professional work in both Azure and AWS.

My personal life

I have a dog called Turbo (German Shepherd), am happily married, and UK based. As well as my interest in technology, I am passionate about Formula 1, Snooker, gaming, and all things nerd-culture.