What is a business intelligence/data science consultant? What does a normal day look like for a data consultant, especially during the work-from-home days we’re currently operating in? Our engineers are here to answer just that with our “A Day in the Life” blog series. Today we’re featuring Lauren Busalacchi, a Senior Business Intelligence Engineer at Continuus Technologies.
Hi, everyone! It’s time for a day in the life of a Senior BI Engineer… spoiler alert, it’s glamorous!
I start everyday with a made-from-scratch oat milk latte machiatto (or some kind of coffee + frothed milk alternative). After enjoying my coffee, I join the daily sprint call. Since its day 1 of our sprint today, I reviewed the report I built, and it was a big hit with the executives on our sprint review meeting! It was a great way to start the day and had the added bonus of seeing my Continuus teammates and Client partners ALMOST in person.
With that meeting wrapped up, it's time to let my dog, Pepper, outside! She's either embracing or protesting the fact that my husband and I no longer leave for work in the mornings by staying under the bed until at least 8:30. When the weather is nice I like to finish up my coffee outside while watching her trot around the yard, it's a very relaxing way to start the day.
I have 30 minutes until my next meeting now, so using my newly found miming skills, I ask my husband if he wants breakfast while he's on his own video call downstairs, and pop some homemade sausage rolls in the oven. Perhaps eating an entire batch of baked goods in a few days isn't the best idea, but I'm currently back in the "I'm just going to bake and try to take my dog for more walks to compensate" stage of working from home, so I'm eating baked goods for breakfast this week.
Since the aforementioned Client sprint just started, I like to take a few minutes to do some planning for myself outside of JIRA, the agile platform we use to track projects and tasks. Really, it's just an excuse to use the sparkly rainbow pen feature on my laptop… who can resist?! By the time I take care of that, my food is ready and it's time to meet (Sorry, not sorry, teammates; you have to watch me eat now). When our meeting is done, it's time to start on that to do list!
Today I'll be working in SSRS, Matillion, Snowflake, and – if everything else goes really well – I might even get to poke around in Power BI. I'm troubleshooting a divide by zero in SSRS, and it is NOT working. I’ve stressed myself out enough that I even had a dream about it last night. Luckily, I have my Continuus teammates to help!
A couple calls and a bunch of messages later, I have a solution. I don't love it, but it works, and that's all you really need sometimes. To troubleshoot this error, I got to poke around in our Client’s Snowflake database, review the Matillion workflows, dig into SSRS report settings, and even throw some data into Power BI to make it easier to manipulate and find the issue (also, lots of Google). And this was all over the course of a couple hours!
Now it's lunch time, yay! Depending on how much I want to get done in a day, I may or may not take a long lunch break. I always take at least 20 minutes away from my computer. The longer I work from home, the more I realize how necessary it is to take that time away from screens. I love it when my lunch time overlaps with my husband's too; as cheesy as it may sound, catching up on our day so far and eating together means so much to me, even though he's right downstairs the whole time! Sometimes I also use my lunch break to run errands, because it's nice to get out the house, and who can resist a mid-day Target adventure?
Now that I've finally resolved this SSRS error I can move onto the next segment of the project in Power BI.
With that out of the way, I can really focus now! I have a meeting-free afternoon, and some work I just want to get DONE. Maybe it's just me, but I have a "focused" look when I want to get some work done. Comfy clothes are #1; in the office, this was a cozy sweater and the comfiest work pants I owned. These days, it’s a flannel, leggings, and a blanket cause I can't be distracted by chilliness. I also have my special glasses so I can stare relentlessly at monitors without losing my ability to see things far away by the end of the day. I wear a hat or a headband to keep that hair out of my face, and over the ear headphones are a MUST (side note: anyone that has a good recommendation for over the ear headphones that don't hurt when you wear them with glasses, please share!). I like to play some loud, energetic music while I do my afternoon work; I have been known for dancing at my desk while getting work done and I am not ashamed of it!
I also want to take a moment to point out that this is one my favorite consulting perks… I have so many more mornings and afternoons free of interruptions so I can just focus and get things done! I don't enjoy stopping and starting in the middle of a task, but at Continuus I rarely have days that require that of me. I can take breaks to play with my dog or make a fancy lunch and know that I have plenty of time to pull everything I need together in less time than I ever did before.
This afternoon I get to start building some dashboards I designed based on some uninspiring (but also highly useful) Excel spreadsheets for our Client. This is one of my favorite things to do! Data is so powerful, and often a simple spreadsheet is only the very tip of the iceberg for the data set being used. My fellow consultants and I have done a lot of prep-work to get to this point; no more copy and pasting, no manual data updates needed, and all that's left is pulling all the pieces together in a pretty dashboard! Obviously, this takes more than one afternoon to complete, but I personally really enjoy time spent making my vision of a fully functional dashboard come to life. It was a busy day of projects but don't worry, Pepper never fails to remind me to log off at the end of the day. After all, who can say no to that face?!
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