Shankar Narayanan SGS is the authors of The Ultimate Guide to Snowpark. We got the chance to sit down with him and find out more about his experience of writing with Packt.
Q: What is the name of your book?
Shankar: The Ultimate Guide to Snowpark
Q: What are your specialist tech areas?
Shankar: I have been in IT my whole life and specialize in implementing Data and Analytics
Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?
Shankar: Being part of the community contributing for a long time and also as a Snowflake Data Superhero, I came across different opportunities and when Packt reached out for an opportunity to write a book, I couldn’t not grab it. When I thought of whom to work on this important project with, the definitive choice was Vivek.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Shankar: The Topic Snowpark was relatively new when we started the book. There was very little content out there posted by Snowflake as a lot of new features were being introduced. We relayed a lot on Snowflake documentations as well as other blogs, specially by the Data Superheroes and the community.
Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
Shankar: We know now that writing a book takes a lot of patience and commitment, but writing on a Topic that is bleeding edge and futuristic is even harder. We had to balance between what is available and what is coming next. Lot of chapters and the demo had to be revisited to accommodate the changes to the features that were released. We had to constantly update the book till the publishing.
Q: What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?
Shankar: Snowpark has become mainstream with many customers running it in production within the Snowflake Data Cloud. With its growing number of features and support for additional workloads like containers and apps. Snowpark is going to be the center of all the innovation that is happening with Snowflake
Q: Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?
Shankar: Ah! This one is easy, we are the first book about Snowpark in the market and currently the only one which covers the end to end about Snowpark. Although I would want more books around this topic. One of the fundamental principles that we followed for the book is making it as practical as we can by supporting it with the supplemental code repository filled with examples and templates that can be used in actual work.
Q: What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away with from the book?
Shankar: This book is a comprehensive book that caters to different types of audience, but mainly developers. Developers can build different kinds of workloads and Apps on top of Snowpark. Enterprises and Organizations can now unlock more insights with the Data within Snowflake by using Snowpark.
Q. What advice would you give to readers jumping into this technology? Do you have any top tips?
Shankar:Stay current and follow the trends. Build the depth of knowledge in your subject matter but also have some breath. I always believe skills are both supplementary and complementary. Leverage the open courses, free training and blogs to gain knowledge.
Q. Do you have a blog that readers can follow?
Shankar: I write blogs on the Snowflake Developer blogs as well as in the SAP community. My blogs can be found at https://shankarnarayanan.com
Q: Can you share any blogs, websites, and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning? What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away with from the book?
Shankar: Snowflake has a very good blog that has a lot of information for Developers. https://medium.com/snowflake
Q. How would you describe your author’s journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?
Shankar: It was definitely a unique experience. Being a first time authors, Packt made sure that they provided the necessary support for us to get the book through. They were very flexible and adopted for changes and also helped with the formatting. I would recommend Packt to aspiring authors.
Q. Do you belong to any tech community groups?
Shankar: I used to write for the SAP Community Network (SCN). Now I am part of the Microsoft Technical Community and the Snowflake Community and often contribute there.
Q. What are your favorite tech journals? How do you keep yourself up to date on tech?
Shankar: I love TechCrunch and Mashable. I also follow the Microsoft and the Snowflake blogs to keep myself updated on those technologies.
Q. How did you organize, plan, and prioritize your work and write the book?
Shankar: We set the schedule in excel and tracked each stage of the progress for every Chapter. We made it a point to try and complete the Chapter early so we will have some room for improvements and changes.
Q. What is that one writing tip that you found most crucial and would like to share with aspiring authors?
Shankar: Don’t wait for the perfect flow to come in, Chapters might feel incomplete for the first time but start writing and get into a habit of following deadlines.
Q. Would you like to share your social handles? If so, please share.
Shankar: Website, LinkedIn, Medium and Github.
You can find Shankar’s book on Amazon by following this link: Please click here
