I'm Nathan Walker. I have experience doing backend web development, data engineering, database design, and data analysis. I'm comfortable with Python and SQL and have dabbled in Java. I'm familiar with Django for web development, AWS for deployment, and Docker for containerization. I have used Snowflake for cloud data warehousing and MariaDB for local deployment.
If you want the bulleted list version, check out my LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanwalkeratl/
I have a Master's of Public Health in Biostatistics, which means I learned a ton of math and applied it by running statistical analyses in SAS, R, and Python. I loved the programming more than the math, so I finished my degree and did an internship with the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) where I analyzed the intersection of Twitter posts and the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic.
In 2018, I joined a consulting firm as a Data Science Consultant. My first client was a Fortune 500 financial firm. I supported the company's marketing department in exploring the customer journey and analyzing marketing effectiveness. I wrote SQL queries to access the Oracle databases and Alteryx and Python to analyze the data and create visualizations. I also automated some of their internal- and external-facing reports to save time and increase accuracy.
My second client was a Fortune 500 manufacturing company. I led the data modeling effort for a national production dashboard that pulled data from more than 70 databases of varying structure, domain, and quality. I worked with Snowflake (the platform) to write a Data Vault style backend for the QlikSense frontend.
I also architected a Kimball data model and wrote queries to create a historical inventory dashboard based on pallet-level transaction data.
To expand my skills beyond database architecture and writing SQL, I transferred to the Data Engineering team in my company and was promoted to Senior Solutions Consultant. Between clients, I did some proof of concept work, creating a containerized web application with Docker in Flask. The application connected to Twitter to retrieve follower/following counts for an arbitrary user's network, saved the data in a Neo4j graph database, then plotted the related users' follower/following counts. This project inspired my personal Twitter Project.
My third client was a medical records company (they can't all be Fortune 500 companies!) and I was tasked with learning Prefect Server, then training the client's Data Engineering team. The training included methods to orchestrate the company's numerous data pipeline jobs. At the same time, I used Traefik to create a reverse proxy to add authentication to the self-hosted version of Prefect in Docker.
In September of 2021, my family had the opportunity to take an extended trip to Spain to study Spanish. I ventured out as an independent contractor and have done some work transferring an order processing system from Excel to SQL, developing a web application, and some personal projects in the data engineering and backend web development spaces.