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Day in the Life of an Oracle Technical Consultant
Meet Rishin – A Senior Technical Consultant in our ERP Managed Services Department here at Version 1
What are your background and qualifications? What led you to the career path you’re on now?
I’m an Oracle Certified IT professional with 10+ years of experience in Application Development. I graduated with a major in physics. My interest in computer programming developed during my college days. In addition to Physics, I chose to take an optional computer science module, this is when I was introduced to different programming languages. Following my keen interest in programming, I later pursued a Masters in Computer Applications. As part of the final year of my Masters, I completed an internship with a reputable company in India. Upon graduation, I continued my journey with the same company and have worked with various Oracle technologies since then.What does your working week look like at a glance?
During a typical workweek, one of my main tasks involves investigating issues faced by our customers in the applications they use to perform their day-to-day activities and providing regression-free code fixes to resolve those issues. I spend a lot of time and effort researching Oracle documents and materials to learn and understand the details of the areas related to my work.
I share this knowledge with my team to ensure that best practices and proper coding standards are followed by all the team. I meet with a smaller group of my peers every day to troubleshoot any show-stopper issues and, together, we come up with a strategy to fix them, consequently increasing the efficiency of the team.
What recurring tasks does your role typically entail every day?
Almost all jobs have some recurring tasks. If I find a task that looks repetitive, I try to find ways to automate them. For example, a recent project that I worked on involved searching for occurrences of specific strings in a repository comprising 1600+ files to replace them with another string. What made it immensely challenging was that the search-string and the replacement-string were mapped in a pre-generated report. Having to do it manually would result in missing the project deadline. Instead, Gareth Lanigan (one of my peers) and I automated this entire process using a Powershell script. The impact of this was huge and significantly reduced the project timeline.What advice would you give to someone looking to enter your industry?
At the beginning of my career, I was given four rules of thumb by my mentor, which I live by even today.
These include:
- Irrespective of the technology you are working on, always keep upgrading your skillsets.
- Always show readiness to push your boundaries and do not hesitate to take on additional tasks and responsibilities.
- Every day is a school day – learn from your peers as everyone has a story to tell.
- Be attentive to details, love what you do and never stop learning.