Wow! 2024 was a WEIRD (and financially positive) year for me professionally to say the least! I was in the middle of my 3rd year at Starburst and loving every minute of it. I was able to spread my wings and join the developer relations (DevRel) team with some very talented folks while still owning the instructor-led training (ILT) function.
Seriously, living the dream! Staying RELEVANT and HAVING FUN!
Then, out of the blue I was contacted by one of the co-founders of Datavolo who I had met years before when at Hortonworks (now Cloudera). Back then, we just acquired his small start-up focused on Apache NiFi and I got to meet him and the engineering team and focus on building out, and delivering, ILT courses for this awesome framework.
Truth is, I fell in love with NiFi and still love the framework to this day.
I hit it off with the other co-founder of Datavolo and fell in love with the focus on offering a hosted service build on top of NiFi that allowed data engineers to build multi-modal data pipelines to prepare their data for AI apps. With all that excitement PLUS the chance to be the founding developer advocate (and a TON of stock options) it was really just a no-brainer for me; although I hated stepping away from such a great role & great people at Starburst.
TLDR; I could write a whole chapter on all the awesome things that happened at Datavolo and the cool devcenter site I created, not to mention the INCREDIBLE & AGILE team we had, but… long story a bit shorter, we were so darn successful Datavolo was acquired by Snowflake AND I didn’t transition over.
BTW, I’m expecting incredible things from this new group within Snowflake! I’m very proud of each and every one of them and was amazingly lucky to work with such talented folks.
It was a fast & fun 4 month period that I’ll always be grateful for — and then it was a few days before Thanksgiving and pondering what I might be doing next. Thankfully, the founders made sure the small group of us not coming over were taken care of to ensure we all had the security to figure out what’s next.
Note: While the standard start-up cliff vesting makes a ton of sense, I do strongly suggest that anyone going to a start-up should attempt to negotiate an agreement that allows for a minimum amount of stock options to be FULLY vested in case an equity event occurs before that initial cliff has expired and your left without a chair to sit in.
When considering what DevRel opportunities I might be a good fit for, a couple of incredible folks back at Starburst (yes, talking about MM and KP!) went to bat for me to see if the leadership team might be interested in me rejoining the team. I really appreciated the enthusiasm that was shared with me about returning and well… my SECOND no-brainer of 2024 presented itself and I ended up returning at very end of the year.
What is it about Starburst? The technology layered on top of Trino STILL offers that same OPTIONALITY and common sense that brought me to Starburst in the first place. That post has plenty of other reasons I originally joined, but having the chance to continue being an advocate for Starburst, Trino, and Apache Iceberg really was a perfect fit for my experiences, skills, and interests.
Long live the Icehouse (Trino + Iceberg)!!