Software is eating the world! It’s a data explosion! The Internet is now of Things! Scratch that, even better – it is of Everything! Did Big Data just call out IoT on Twitter? Scroll down to find out. [1]
I kid the Internet. In all seriousness, what a magical time we live in. Moore’s Law means cheap hardware, then next thing you know, Cloud. Internet ubiquity invites the globe to the party. Feats of software engineering that were impossible for nation-states to pull off a decade ago are de rigeur for clever teens. On their mobile phones.
I became disillusioned after a few years as a sales engineer for big ticket software products. I talked to so many operations people who spent all their time putting out fires instead of automating and improving. Even worse, it seemed nearly all the actual users were sad about their applications. These amazing modern conveniences were supposed to make our lives easier, not more difficult. The actual outcome was the exact opposite of the expected outcome. Oh irony!
These thoughts and feelings led me to join Atlassian in 2008. If you have never heard of that company, I reckon you have at least heard of JIRA, Confluence or HipChat. Here was a group making software that people were using voluntarily. Even tiny teams could implement it without breaking the bank, or gratis if they were building open source. Furthermore, the company was totally focused on software development. Agile was rising to prominence. Git went from non-existence to dominance in an eye blink. Software development was undergoing a sea change in the right direction.
This is what brings me to SingleStore. Companies like Google, Facebook, eBay, and Netflix had to feed their databases and infrastructure all the steroids to meet the challenge of true web scale. They, among others, pioneered new ways to ingest and work with previously unimaginable mountains of data. Did you use metric prefixes above giga- in your daily life 10 years ago? Nor did I. Yottabytes of records, anyone?
Being able to handle massive data sets, using them to make real-time decisions resulting in delighted customers is the new nice thing that I believe everyone deserves. That is why I am elated to join SingleStore, focusing on the Community Edition. Imagine what you could build better, stronger and faster if the database underneath was ready to handle anything thrown at it.
If you are already using SingleStore Community Edition, I am very keen to hear what you’re doing with it. If you have a moment, please take this very short survey. Don’t hesitate to hit me up on our public Slack, email or elsewise.
And away we go…
[1] – Citations
Why Software Is Eating The World
The Internet of Things is revolutionising our lives, but standards are a must
