how hard can it be?
abstract Link to heading
Occasionally, a recruiter (or recruiter-bot) asks me if I have ‘a particular set of skills’ that they are looking for. Here’s the answer: Probably. What does ‘probably’ mean?
- I have done most of the things that there are tools for prior to the reliable invention of that tool.
- OR it is a tool that I used to use more than 10 years ago.
- OR it means my employer has considered that me doing something on that tool is a waste of their money - in which case they pass this to a junior or cut it from the budget.
- OR it means I’ve used a tool similar to it, but not the exact same tool, but generally that could not be my focus.
So here is a list of tools that I have used, but never mastered, but never needed to master. In any case, my attitude is, if the tool doesn’t actually suck, how hard can it be?
Tools I really liked, mastered and wish were still around or more popular
- Wired for OLAP
- Essbase v9
- VoltDB (but nobody cared)
- Hashi Consul
- Metabase
- Cognos Impromptu
- Pentaho
Tools that are popular that I have played with
- ClickHouse
- Databricks
- Snowflake
Tools I liked & built with but didn’t have to master
- DynamoDB
- Kafka + Debezium
- AWS Kinesis
- AWS Simple Message Service (SMS)
- AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS)
- IBM MQ
- Metabase
- Preset / Superset
- Teradata
- DynamoDB
- BigQuery
- Mercury LoadRunner
- PowerBI
- Hashi Vault
- MS Fabric
- Toad
- ksh
- Polars
- Pandas
- Tableau Server
- Grafana
- JavaScript
Meh
- Cognos Powerplay
- Terragrunt
- ErWin
- Talend
- Hyperion Planning
- Jupyter Notebooks
- Jaspersoft
Tools I didn’t like but used anyway
- Oracle Data Integrator
- Hive
- Informatica
- Talend
- Oracle Exalytics
- PHP
Never touched the stuff
- Hadoop
- CouchDB
- MongoDB
Ick
- ABAP