Get to know iOLAP Academy Mentors

iOLAP Academy is a summer program designed for tech enthusiasts hungry for experience, to build their knowledge and try it out in real life. Our program is structured as a mix of lectures, mentoring sessions, home assignments, and a final hands-on team project. We offer you an opportunity to learn from and with the best, try out your skills, gain irreplaceable experience and start your IT career!

We already wrote about  What participants think about the Academy, Why iOLAP Academy, iOLAP Academy Agenda and where are today the participants of the 1st generation.

In this article, you will get to know better some of the mentors from the iOLAP Academy, what brought them to where they are today, what to expect from the mentors and why this program is perfect for you!

Maja Trstenjak, an AWS mentor and expert in her field. She has been working with iOLAP for a year and a half. As a Data Engineer, she is focused on architecting, developing and deploying robust, highly scalable Big Data solutions on the AWS Big Data processing platform.

Andrea Hrelja is the youngest of all mentors and likes programming in Python where he will be mentoring you as well. He started programming at the university and liked it very much so he became a student teaching assistant for some programming subjects where he learned that student feedback is very valuable - he got to learn the most about a subject while teaching it. iOLAP Academy is a great opportunity to gain other people's feedback on solutions we have in place across multiple projects and build on that feedback.

Tea Tomljanović is an SQL specialist and has a ton of projects behind her. She has been working as an Engineer at iOLAP for the last 4 years. Ever since she can remember, she had a strong connection with numbers and everything that goes with them. Her analytical mind brought her where she is today. This same mind is not too preferable in her private life as she highlighted, as she tends to overthink, but can be of great importance when it comes to analyzing big data.

What are your main goals as a mentor?

Maja: AWS is an extensive cloud service but with good mentorship, you can get a grasp of core AWS services in a few weeks. My main goal is to give candidates a solid basis in AWS and show them how to use innovations in the future.

Andrea: My main goals are to demystify a productionized system and introduce industry concepts to the Academy participants. I'm excited to hear their feedback on the system we will be building and hopefully improve it for later usage in different projects.

Tea: As a high school student, I've talked that I will be a teacher one day. Although this is currently not true, iOLAP gave me an opportunity to take a glimpse at what teaching would feel like. My main goals as a mentor are to teach, encourage, and support all young people that are starving for knowledge.

What is the most complicated thing you did in your tool/technology?

Maja: Choosing the right infrastructure for an individual use case is always the biggest challenge, especially cost-wise. Also, the interconnection between numerous services with your infrastructure can be complicated.

Andrea: It's hard to say as each project includes its own complexities as well as similarities to other projects. I'm most proud of the Ingestion framework we built at Front Burner and that's the architecture we will be using in the Academy Python Intro.

Tea: Talking about SQL, and Big Data that I'm working with, one of the most complicated things was to join multiple tables with millions of rows and optimize the query to work as smoothly as it can. Maybe it sounds easy, but trust me, optimizing the queries can be a real struggle.

Tips you would give to iOLAP Academy participants?

Maja: Don't get overwhelmed by all the new information and just learn at your own pace! iOLAP Academy will help you learn everything you need to start working as a Junior Data Engineer, just keep in mind that reading the documentation is your best friend.

Andrea: Absorb as much as you can, work together, and carefully think through a problem before providing a solution

Tea: Last but not the least, be curious, proactive, and ask questions. It's ok not to know everything. Ask questions and collect knowledge as much as you can.

Want to get ahead in your IT career with expert mentors?

Join our Academy this year and learn from the best! Applications are open until July 24.