The next chapter in my career started a few months back. I joined the user tools team at Influxdata in September of last year. So far… it has been awesome, and I’m excited to share my experiences.

OSS and Cutting Edge Tech

I’m very passionate about creating open-source software. I love being able to contribute to the larger software community. Be that creating my OSS projects or contributing to others. Beyond that, I love being at the bleeding edge of technologies. Influxdata is the creator of Influxdb, the leader in time-series databases. I used Influxdb version 1 in a previous job and loved it. It is exciting to contribute to version 2. We’re breaking our won records to provide the community with the best database for their time-series data needs.

What is a User Tools Team

Don’t feel bad, I had to ask this question… Put simply, the User Tools Team obsesses with the user experience. We interact with the community to draw out issues that fester in our blind spots. Our team takes grandiose ideas, prototype them, and understand what’s possible, then make it a reality!

In the second week of my employment, I was tasked with creating a configuration as code solution for all restful resources in the Influxdb platform. Did we have an idea of what that solution is? No, we did not. We had hand-wavy ideas for what we wanted to do, but nothing specific. Fortunately, we were able to create a solution that evolved to suit all our use cases and beyond.

What’s next?

Day to day is going to be writing Go and understanding better how our users want to use the Influxdb platform. However, tomorrow could be the start of some Rust work to extend the Flux time-series data programming language. Maybe jumping into a conversation with a frustrated community member (btw, I hope anyone and everyone who has let us know their frustrations so we can remedy the situation!). All in all, I’m extremely eager for what comes next.