Julie Heckman
Snowflake Data Superhero & Director of Data Engineering at Right Triangle Consulting
Kansas City, Missouri, United States
Actions
Julie Heckman has channeled a love for math that began with high school algebra and calculus into a career converting data into opportunities for insurance, healthcare, and financial services clients. With a Master of Arts degree in Mathematics from the University of Idaho, and earlier a Bachelor of Science in Secondary Math Education from the University of Missouri, she initially taught high school math. Spurred by an interest in the financial markets, she then joined an equities firm and later became a software developer who used Big Data to help stock traders evaluate their strategies, facilitating millions of stock trades annually.
Julie later worked for agriculture and financial technology startups where she used Big Data, streaming and traditional databases to find, identify, and manage data, making it useful and actionable for peers and leaders. But as she also learned, working at a startup becomes less about discovery — and more about production and implementation — as the company scales and matures.
Ever curious, Julie came to Right Triangle Consulting in 2020 and now has years of experience using proven data engineering expertise to help clients modernize their data architecture's and move to the cloud where they can spend more time using the data rather than managing servers that house it.
Julie enjoys working with a variety of client types to help them solve business problems. Often, she works with legacy data that needs to be cultivated for a specific purpose. For example, she and a peer collaborated with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and healthcare technology provider Vantage Technology, using their proprietary software combined with Azure Data Factory and Power BI. Working remotely, they gathered and analyzed data to help a nonprofit more efficiently deploy messaging designed to increase COVID-19 testing and vaccinations among residents in traditionally underserved communities.
Recently, and as more consultants have joined Right Triangle, she’s taken her passion for discovery to a new level by seeking, finding, and testing emerging technologies to see if they’ll meet clients’ needs or complement modern powerhouse tools like Snowflake. Increasingly, that includes reviewing new cloud-based and server-less solutions that stream, model, govern and transform data.
Typical of Julie’s passion for precision is her zeal for math, budgeting, and recipes used in baking. A voracious reader, she devours thrillers and mysteries. Driven by a natural curiosity for numbers and analysis, Julie is bullish about the future of data management and the emerging technologies that can best serve Right Triangle’s clients.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Data Squirrel and other terms you thought you knew
Data Lake, Data Warehouse, LakeHouse, Data Mesh . . . what does it all mean and where do these things fit within a data architecture. The answer is . . . it depends! It depends on the industry, technology and even individual person that you ask.
As a serial startup employee turned data consultant, I've seen it all and I have so many thoughts about how these words fit together and what they mean in context of the business problems they are trying to solve. I'll walk through a brief history of data applications and development and try to break down how data architecture has changed, where we are currently and where the industry might be headed.
Data isn't Agile and Other Lies I've Loved
As a former high school teacher turned data architect and engineer, my career path has twisted through a variety of types of industries, companies and project management styles. One of my biggest projects at my first software engineering job I wrote a project management application and when I was interviewing somewhere else the interviewer looked at me and said- so you wrote JIRA? The first time someone described Agile to me the words "cogs in a wheel" were used and I instantly had a bad taste in my mouth.
However, over the last 15+ years being in the tech industry, I've really had a reckoning with the Agile development process and what it specifically means for data projects. This talk will go through my experiences with agile and data and how I've come to view the role of agile in data architecture, development and engineering.
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top