The eagle-eyed of you will have noticed that I have recently started a new career at Crate.IO. After 6 years in side the KDAB family (including Kolab Systems, KDAB UK and KDAB Germany) this came as a surprise to many people. KDAB gave me a lot of freedom to achieve some long-lasting successes as well as some failures for me to learn from. I will always be grateful. But it was time to move on. Here is how I ended up where I did.
What Do You Want?
1. Find an excellent team.
Having left KDAB I wanted to take the time to evaluate what I was trying to achieve with my career. I was never much of a programmer, but I like to think I have an excellent overview of software engineering as a whole. Whilst I did not want to be hacking (and no employer should want that, either) I did want to be kicking down doors. I want to kick down the doors that the other engineers did not even realise were in their way. This type of servant leadership is hugely enjoyable when you are working with the right team...
2. Product company, not consulting.
My career has been split between product and consulting work. Most recently, at KDAB, I was part of an incredible team on consultants. Those guys are solving problems with C++/Qt/OpenGL that most people would be outright scared of. The problem with consulting, though, is the lack of ownership. KDAB's engineers would achieve glorious results but not get any glory. Not only that, but often they would be working on multiple problems for multiple clients and not get the chance to feel a sense of real ownership. All software engineering is a team sport, both consulting and product work. But there is something awesome about being part of a team with a long-term product vision and ownership.
3. Free Software angle.
I have always worked in or around Free Software. This is something hugely important to me. Free Software was the subject of my PhD and has been at the heart of every job I've had. There is a certain sense of "doing it for a greater good" which really adds some good vibes to the work environment.
4. In Berlin.
I love Berlin. I might tongue-in-cheek write about the brokenness every now and then but, fundamentally, this is my kinda town. I've been here for almost two years, but I still feel like I'm new in town. In the grand scheme of things, I am. My time here is nowhere near done and so any new job had to keep me here. If this meant regular travel, so be it. Long commute? For the right job, perhaps. But with a large tech startup scene in Berlin this seemed unnecessary.
Joining Crate.IO
I write recently about my experience of attending the Crate.IO Snow Sprint. This gave me a great opportunity to meet the Crate team, learn about the technology and eat some phenomenal Leberkäse.
The Team
Needless to say, all of my boxes were ticked. I was impressed by the leadership team. The CEO and CTO were both very open about the company. This was not a recruitment sales pitch. Instead I was given the warts-and-all story of where the company and technology were at and where I might fit in to help. They are also generally cool guys with great humour under the pressure of leading a startup. Sadly, I did not get too much time to spend with the two team leaders during the sprint. What time I did spent with them gave me the impression that we all saw the world in very similar ways and that we were going to work well together. Everyone else was very welcoming of an outsider, had plenty of time to spare for me to help me understand the tech and generally made me feel like part of the team. Which I wasn't. As a nice touch, after deciding to evaluate how I might fit in, I even had the opportunity to speak with the newest member of the board, Ari Helgason. It was very nice to hear the investor's voice. And to hear that voice was genuinely excited about the technology...
The Technology
...we definitely need to talk about the technology. If I was going to dedicate myself to a product company, the product had to be something epic. Something I cared about as least as much as Kolab. Crate is a departure from what I have done in the past but shares one crucial aspect that I care about most... solving a real problem. At this time I am not going into too much detail about Crate and what it does. What I will say is this: as a database, Crate helps to solve some seriously complex problems in the Big Data space, yet it is so easy to deploy that, at the Snow Sprint, I had a three-node cluster running on my laptop, with a simple schema, importing data, within minutes of me first sitting down to play with it. SQL with scaling, resilience, containerisation and such ease of use... it's a pretty compelling story.
Looking Forward
In future posts I will write about what it is I am precisely doing at Crate.IO. For now there is a lot of hard work ahead of me and I am definitely going to enjoy the ride. I have already started to submit presentations on Crate to various conferences, so I hope to see you soon and we can talk about what I'm up to.
I recently moved this blog away from a self-hosted Wordpress (just too much hassle to keep maintained). The good news is that this new career change will present me the opportunity to go back to some of the metrics-related content I used to work on before. So, if you have been following my nonsense for some time, you (hopefully) will be pleased to know that more oversized data visualisations are on their way.
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