Life

Christien Kelly ’20

Data Engineer at Cardata

Toronto, Canada

Major/Minor: Data Analytics

Data Engineer Christien Kelly ’20 lives and works in Toronto, the largest city in Canada. He works for Cardata and helps move data through the company in a clean and manageable way. The former Big Red varsity swimmer starts off each day doing laps in the pool before heading to work – either from home or in the office.

“At close to 9 a.m. we have a daily stand-up meeting where all the software developers meet, talk about what we’re doing, if we’re stuck on anything and what we’re planning to work for the day. Coding for most of the day.

Lunch at home today — a sandwich I made with delicious leftovers.

Today I am “load-balancing.” We get a lot of information and we have to make sure our servers can process all that information. For example, if your phone is getting 300 messages a second, it might not function normally. My job is to make sure the “phone” can take in whatever number of requests are coming in.”

Christien Kelly working at his computer.

Christien Kelly holding a plate with a sandwich on it.

The soft skills that you learn in Data Analytics also apply to Data Engineering. I have to be able to communicate to the other engineers on my team so they can understand the changes to the infrastructure, what is the benefit and is it really feasible.

I also took some computer science classes that helped me. Now I’m working in PHP, Go and Java. I didn’t study those languages at Denison, but the computer science curriculum really structured the foundation. And I’m grateful for my French curriculum because I translate for some of the pieces of the application.