Like migrating caribou, you tend to follow the trends of what clients are doing, which dictates what you work on as a consultant.
Today, we’re talking to Lynn Langit, an independent Cloud architect. She is an AWS Community Hero, Google Cloud developer expert, and former Microsoft MVP. Lynn is a lifelong learner, and she has worked broad and deep across all three large providers. These days, she works mostly with Google Cloud and AWS, rather than Azure, because that’s what her clients are using.
Some of the highlights of the show include:

Differences between the West Coast and global use of Cloud
Education is key; Lynn is th co-founder of Teachingkidsprogramming.org
Lynn helped create curriculum and resources for school-age children; even her young daughter taught classes on how to code
Training for teachers was also needed, so TKP Labs was formed to offer fee-based teacher and developer training
Lynn started with classroom training, but has transitioned to online learning
Lynn is focusing on Big Data projects and using tools to solve real-world problems
Pre-processing and batching data, but not streaming it
AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are all coming out with Big Data-oriented tools
Companies need to understand when the market is ready to accept a new paradigm; in the data world, change is more slow than in the programming world
If you touch a database and get burned, you are not willing to use it again; or you may have never tried to archive your data; hire a consultant to help you
Machine learning APIs give customers value quickly; review them before building custom models
Migrating data can be a costly project and restricts where the data lives
As Cloud proliferates, how will that impact technical education? Lynn’s Cloud for College Students to the rescue!
Shift from interactive to unidirectional, one-to-many learning styles; the Cloud is ready for serverless, but education is not ready for teacherless
Road that many of us walked to get to technical skills no longer exists; how to become a modern technologist
Ageism: By age 40, you are considered a manager or useless; don’t be afraid to learn something new

Links:

Digital Ocean
AWS Community Hero
Microsoft Azure
Teachingkidsprogramming.org
Digigirlz
TKP Labs
Lynn Langit on Lynda.com
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
Google BigQuery
Amazon Athena
AWS Glue
Cloud Dataflow
Cloud Dataprep
Lambda
Amazon EC2
Learn Python the Hard Way