It was eight years ago when I joined Hortonworks. I had offers from both Hortonworks & Cloudera and little did I know either of those paths would have let to the same organization eventually. Joining a valley-based open-source big-data product-company at the beginning of 2014 was a complete no-brainer for me. Looking back eight years later, it clearly has been the best job I have ever had.
The journey has had many organization twists, too! Hortonworks went public before Cloudera. Cloudera followed, then low and behold we merged together (truly the RIGHT THING to do). Not to be outdone by our own selves, we then went back private a few months ago. I’ll surely be watching from the sidelines to see what major organizational event will happen next!
I absolutely have to thank two Davids for helping me make the decision to join Hortonworks. David S. was working with me and we were learning MongoDB and Hadoop alongside each other and David B. was a career mentor and former boss. David B. helped me realized what it took to make it beyond the VP level I was at and David S. encouraged me to consider refocusing my career to be 100% hands-on customer-facing. It took a few months of deep reflection before I realized that yes, the second half of my career needs to be about being technically relevant and just plain having some fun doing stuff I like.
Joining Hortonworks was the perfect next step for me!! Thanks Davids for the help in getting me to RUN head-first into the consulting opportunity in the professional services organization. I have loved being an individual contributor this whole time all while offering up past experiences and lessons-learned to any leader who wanted to hear it. Not having to approve anyone’s vacation request (and all the “other” paperwork) has been an incredible stress-lifting experience. My goal and focus during my entire tenure has always been to help our customers become successful.
I laugh now looking back at thinking how much Java MapReduce coding I would be doing. Nothing wrong with MR (still have a few clients actively developing with this framework), but I quickly (and logically) got focused on Apache Hive and fell in love with Apache Pig. I think I cried when Cloudera finally dropped Pig from the product stack; haha. I also got to round out my tech skills in the Hadoop distributions with Apache tools like Sqoop, Oozie, and HBase.
Not much later, I added other cool Apache frameworks like Kafka, Storm, Ranger, and Phoenix to my tool belt. After a few years, I asked if I could go back to my dream job — to become a technical instructor. For my sins, they granted me this wish; haha. Dang, with Sunday night – Friday night travel I got even more busy than I was as a consultant, but I loved it. It also allowed me to resume international work travel for which I’ll be forever grateful.
In the education team (part of professional services) I got to tackle new technologies, too, like Apache NiFi and Spark. I even recently augmented my streaming frameworks knowledge with Apache Flink. More important than all of those awesome technologies, I was able to help out so many clients in a wide variety of business domains. Tons of vehicle industries (automotive, aircraft, rail, etc), finance, telecom, oil & gas, insurance, healthcare, retail, to name a few.
Even more important than the technologies and great & interesting clients… even more important than having fun at work and remaining technically relevant… THE COLLEAGUES AND FRIENDS I MADE ALONG THE WAY. There are way too many to call out and I’ll surely forget someone. Plus, you know who you are anyways. It has been my complete pleasure to work with each and everyone of you.
Even better yet… these awesome relationships will continue. While I like to think I’m a hard-working fella, I also know I have been incredibly fortunate & lucky along the way. I wish everyone the same fortune & luck in our continued endeavors.
Whats next for me in 2022? Well, just wait a bit and you’ll surely hear from me about my new role and company. I can promise that customer education & enablement in the data domain is still my focus and you can expect my next role to be in-line with what I have been doing for the last eight years. You can also expect this role will take all the tenacity and grit I can muster as it will be at an early-stage start-up company much like back when I join Hortonworks!
Good fortune to us all and have a Happy New Year.
It was super nice to get so many positive comments and reactions on LinkedIn for my job change notice as you can see at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lestermartin_wrapping-up-my-8-year-hortonworks-cloudera-activity-6882803437050830848-Kpyb.