22-25 April 2026

Full 180° - Lessons Learned from Switching Careers

2022

TL; DR

A little over five years ago I was a freshly graduated math student doing teaching on the side, while trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up. Fast forward five years and here I am! In this session I will share my experiences and the insights I found useful entering into a completely new field and having to learn a massive amount of new skills in a short time. Join to get some inspiration for keeping your knowledge up to date or expand it, or make a complete shift in your career!

Session Details

A little over five years ago I was a freshly graduated mathematics student doing teaching on the side, all while still trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up. There had been a thought brewing in the back of my mind of taking a leap into something completely new to me - IT. Fast forward five years and here I am! A lot has happened over these five years, and in this session I will be sharing my experiences of doing a complete 180-degree career switch. Among the challenges I will talk about is how to handle being faced with a lot of unknowns, having to learn completely new concepts and solutions very quickly (and implement them!), and trying to find my way in a new community - all while trying to figure out what topics made me excited to go to work everyday. I will share my approach, my experiences and the insights that I found useful, all in the hope of being able to inspire anyone to take the next step - regardless if you are looking to keep your knowledge up to date, expand your knowledge to a new area, or make an equally complete shift in your career.

3 things you'll get out of this session

Speakers

Heini Ilmarinen

heiniilmarinen.com

Heini Ilmarinen's previous sessions

Securing Cosmos DB: Ready for Production!
Getting started with Cosmos DB is super easy and you get the scalability and global reach out of the box. For production scenarios we often have additional requirements for security, that could span from restricting public endpoints to auditing user actions on data. In this session, we will go through the different security capabilities available for Cosmos DB, focusing deeper on networking and access control. We will cover how to control networking and use private endpoints with Cosmos DB, as well as how the global nature of the service makes these different from the rest of the services in Azure. We will also explore the different options for access control on the data in Cosmos DB and particularly how the newest addition to the mix, Cosmos DB RBAC, can help keep your data secure.
 
To Bicep or to Terraform - That is the Question
If you're getting started with an implementation using Infrastructure as Code, one of the first things to figure out is which tool to use. In this session will dive into the details of the differences of Bicep and Terraform to help you choose the best option for your scenario. We will begin the session by going through the similarities of Bicep and Terraform, but will then jump straight into the differences of these two tools. We will cover how state is handled, how configuration is scoped and how making changes is evaluated. Then we will go through how existing resources are handled and using preview features. At the end of this session you will be able to choose which tool is the best option for your implementation!
 
Knee-Deep In Tech Live @ SQL Bits
Be part of a live audience recording of an episode of Knee-Deep in Tech!
 
Less Clicking, More Coding! Data Platform Development Using Infrastructure as Code
In this session we will go through the concepts that you need to grasp in order to get started with infrastructure as code for Azure. We will look at how the process for managing resources in Azure changes compared to the way we've previously done it, and finally we will explore a complete workflow of deploying your Azure data platform architecture as code using Terraform and how to work on that code with your team.
 
Networking unlocked for the Azure Data Services
Are you trying to make sense of how to secure your Azure Data Service to your private network, but can't just seem to make sense of service endpoints, private links and private endpoints, as well as when to use which approach? Join this session to understand networking for the Azure Data services and the differences of these methods for integrating your Azure Data Services to a virtual network. You will learn what are the benefits of each approach and what challenges you can solve with them.