Employee Spotlight: Johnny Cecil

Meet Johnny Cecil, Trava’s data engineer!

In your words, what is your role at Trava.

All things data. It could be different from one day to the next. I do a lot of dashboard reporting, so getting data and making it understandable for people within the company. I build scripts to move data from one area to the next. Building out different pipelines so that way we can get data from the product or to the product. Doing data analysis. Basically if it's data related, I'm involved in most cases.

Describe Trava in 3 words. 

So if I were to describe Trava, and I think this may actually be one of the taglines, but trusted, security, experts.

Where is your happy place?

I'm a homebody, so I would say at home with my family. Just hanging out here. We do like to travel, but I like being at home.

If you could give your 13 year old self advice, what would it be?

I had to think about this one, but I think my advice would be, there's going to be something called Bitcoin that's going to show up, and just get as much of that as you can.

What is your favorite motivational quote?

This one was difficult, mostly because the quotes that I enjoy are nonsensical, but if I were to come up with a motivational one, it would probably be that,

"Luck is when hard work meets opportunity."

It lets you control your own destiny there.

What has been your favorite project at Trava?

Yeah, so as I mentioned, I do a lot of dashboards and dashboard creations, one of which was our executive dashboard, which brings in just all kinds of data from throughout the company from financial data and product and how that's working as well. It allowed me to utilize a bunch of different tools and skill sets, grabbing data from third party applications, grabbing data from our product, grabbing data that we maintain in-house, and bringing it all together in one place that has been useful for those in the company. That one was fun just because it allowed me to do a bunch of different things on one project.

Cats or dogs?

Oh, cats. Dogs are like another child. I've already got two kids. I don't need another needy animal constantly wanting attention. They drool, they're messy. Just give me a cat. I'll feed it once a day. I'll maybe see it sometime throughout the day. Much easier to take care of.

What advice would you provide to someone interested in your field?

The advice that I would provide is, come in with a hungry attitude to learn. A lot of how I got to where I am in this field was self- taught and I learned as I went. My degree is in political science, so it's as far from what I'm doing now as you can get, and so I feel like anyone that wants to get into this field, there's a lot of self- learning and self- teaching that's involved. As important as data is, it's still a relatively new field in the industry, so you just have to dig in and learn what you need to know.