About

Intro

I am Akos Barabas. I live in Berlin, the lively and lovely capital of Germany. My profession is to make things better with data.

TL;DR

Programming languages: SQL, PL/SQL, Python, Scala

Big Data: Spark, Flink, Hadoop, Hive, Kafka, Kinesis, Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake, Greenplum, Kudu, Databricks

DBMS: Oracle, Postgres

Cloud: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Dataviz: Superset, Tableau, Looker

Data modeling: entity-relationship (ER), starschema, snowflake, Data Vault

Others: Airflow, Docker, Kubernetes, CloudFoundry, Talend, Adjust, Snowplow, Great Expectations, git, gitHub, MLFlow

Education: BSc in technical informatics, MSc in business intelligence

Human languages: English, German

How I got into data

When I first got in touch with data management during my bachelor studies, it caught my imagination: that was the first area I met where technology can help directly to improve a business. Soon I got the chance to participate in my first data warehouse project and at the same time my alma mater started a new MSc program in business intelligence - it wasn’t a question that I’ll pursue this degree. It happened to be a double win: besides of deepening my theoretical knowledge I was hired by university spin-off company to contribute to a near-real time data analytics solution for a nuclear power plant.

The early years

After my masters graduation, I’ve been working at Starschema Ltd., where I mostly designed and developed data warehouses and other analytical solutions for clients in the financial sector. But that wasn’t the only type of experience I gathered those times: I’ve been acting as business analyst, project manager and infrastructure administrator in some projects.

Growing big (data)

As I’ve spent most of my Starschema years on-site at General Electric, it wasn’t a huge change when I got hired by the American industrial giant. Although I kept dealing with data warehousing and learned a lot about MPPs, my most memorable and impactful project was when I’ve contributed to the data services of GE’s industrial cloud called Predix.

January of 2018 wasn’t just a beginning of a new year but a big change in my life: I moved to Berlin and joined Omio (it was called GoEuro those times), one of the most fastest-growing startups in Germany those times. My journey with Omio was at least so much exciting than the ones we facilitated for our customers (Omio is a travel startup): the data team (which I was the member of) had to follow and support the fast growth of the company. At the beginnings, the most of our time was taken by the stabilisation of legacy data warehouse - once we were done with this, we were able to perform a redesign both in terms of tech stack (e.g. deploying Spark and Kafka) and data model.

Becoming a coronapreneur

After roughly one year of consideration and with the help of lucky and unlucky coincidences, I made the greatest decision of my professional life: I went freelance in September 2020. I utterly enjoy getting know new clients and technologies while building amazing data solutions - and I don’t expect this to change in the future.