First Article

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Hi all!! I’m really happy to be here in this space, sharing my journey through the world of AI, big data, and cloud architecture.

A little about me

I’m Rocio, a cloud engineer/architect and data enthusiast with a passion for building scalable and efficient systems that turn lots of numbers/dates/words into “good decisions”.

From my very first job at 18, diving into Informix tables was like opening up a world of possibilities (yes, I'm a little older). As I grew older, my tools expanded to include Postgres and SQL Server. Today, with my personal and professional evolution, I design massive data warehouses and lakes. The older I get, the more data I manage! 😄

Over the past year (especially since the COVID era in 2020), I’ve dived into a range of data-focused initiatives. To mention a few examples: migrating on-premise platforms to the cloud, architecting data lakes from the ground up, and enhancing pipelines that were already working to add new features. Some of the most rewarding and meaningful challenges involved building near-real-time solutions for highly demanding banking and supply-chain users, as well as dramatically improving query latency on tables holding millions of rows.

Since the end of 2024, I’ve been diving deep into generative AI, working in architecting and developing multi-agent systems, building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, and integrating large language models into data workflows. Every day feels like day one as I explore new frameworks/tools , learning the basics again, new words and new acronyms every day (RAG, GPT, LangChain, LangGraph,…) … because continuous learning is the only way to stay sharp in today’s tech war.

What to Expect Here

This little space of the world wide “Windswept” is where I’ll be dumping my weekly learnings, deep-dive tutorials, and real-world case studies. You can look forward to posts like:

• TIL (Today I Learned) snippets: Quick, bite-sized tips on tooling tricks, configuration gotchas, or performance hacks.

• Deep dives and comparisons: In-depth comparison tools, complete with code samples, cost analyses, and architecture diagrams.

• “How I did it” guides: End-to-end walkthroughs of deploying big-data stacks with Terraform, Cloudformation, or cloud-native services.

• AI experiments: Exploring open-source models, fine-tuning strategies, and integrating GenAI into data pipelines.

Why “Windswept”?

I come from a coastal city where strong wind, routinely reaching 100 to 125 km/h (62 to 77 mph), are part of everyday life, sweeping through the streets and transforming everything in their path. That energy inspired "Windswept": it represents how a single breeze can drive change, elevate our actions, and fuel continuous improvement in our daily work. That's precisely the drive I want to share with you.

The wind of change will sweep away old professional customs and habits, along with rudimentary and routine tasks. The rise of big data and AI will now make it possible to automate tasks, obtain immediate answers, get insight from a huge repositories and deliver faster. We need to be prepare for that.

Stay windswept, stay curious!