Where to start? My name is Charles Rinaldini. I never wanted to work in the tech world, but was convinced by my friend in college that I’d do really well in an Information Systems program back at the University of Texas at San Antonio. I had begrudgingly taken years of computer programming courses in high school and was completely over the idea of ever doing that as a career. I really wanted to help other people with their lives and was considering majoring in Psychology, actually. But after having a down to earth conversation with a friend who was just finishing up the program I decided to change. My main drive behind this decision was that it would be a really easy major to declare as I was already very familiar with the entire curriculum.

And that takes me to my main driving force in life – getting things accomplished in the easiest way possible.

After graduating, I entered the world of corporate America like many graduates do. I was placed on a project working for the US Department of Education and there is where I was first introduced to how data is really used. Up until that point my only impression of data was how a front end interacted with a database and not the power data has if used to derive information. I was hooked from there.

I’ve done may things with data from normal report development, to managing worldwide teams creating interfaces to implement large scale ERPs, and most recently my journey into cloud BI and data lakes.

My goal with this blog is really to share my struggles and successes in trying to figure out the best and most practical ways of accomplishing things in data engineering.