TimBerglund
Tim serves as the VP of Developer Relations at IBM, where he and his team work to make certain parts of the IBM portfolio more accessible to developers. He is a regular speaker at conferences and a presence on YouTube explaining complex technology topics in an accessible way. He lives with his wife in Arvada, CO. He has three grown children, three step-children, and four grandchildren, with a fifth on the way.
Event-driven architectures are not new, but they are newly ascendant. For the first time since the client-server revolution of 40 years ago, a new architectural paradigm is changing the way we build systems. Apache Kafka and microservices are at the center of this movement.
When things get a little bit cheaper, we buy a little bit more of them. When things get cheaper by several orders of magnitude, you don't just see changes in the margins, but fundamental transformations in entire ecosystems. Apache Pinot is a driver of this kind of transformation in the world of real-time analytics. Pinot is a real-time, distributed, user-facing analytics database. The rich set of indexing strategies makes it a perfect fit for running highly concurrent queries on multi-dimensional data, often with millisecond latency. It has out-of-the box integration with Apache Kafka, S3, Presto, HDFS, and more. And it's so much faster on typical analytics workloads that it is not just a marginally better data warehouse, but the cornerstone of the next revolution in analytics: systems that expose data not just to internal decision makers, but to customers using the system itself. Pinot helps expand the definition of a "decision-maker" not just down the org chart, but out of the organization to everyone who uses the system.
Have you ever stopped to think about how to build a database? The thing is, there isn't just one way, as we can see by the massive number of data infrastructure options we have to choose from. It's a nonstop series of tradeoffs, each motivated by the constraints the database wants to satisfy. An in-memory transactional database would be one thing. A general-purpose, single-server relational database would be another. A low-latency, horizontally scalable analytics database would be...the journey we're going to take.
Alistair Cockburn has described software development as a game in which we choose among three moves: invent, decide, and communicate. Most of our time at No Fluff is spent learning how to be better at inventing. Beyond that, we understand the importance of good communication, and take steps to improve in that capacity. Rarely, however, do we acknowledge the role of decision making in the life of software teams, what can cause it to go wrong, and how to improve it.
Zero fluff.