Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.
How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?
Ever notice how the customer experience across every industry is evolving to be more frictionless, integrated, and immediate? For example, when you need to catch a ride somewhere, rideshare services allow you to know exactly where your car is at all times, and when you are done, you just step out to your destination. Don’t want to make a trip to the grocery store? Shop on your phone, watch shoppers collect the right items, and have it delivered to your doorstep.
These experiences are made possible by continuously acting on streams of data as they are created. Every customer action, car movement, inventory change, order, payment are all data streams of events. My job is to partner with customers across the globe in all industries to help them with the transformation of using real-time data. I guide them on how to use data streaming for their business, and they help me understand how our technology can evolve to better support them.
What’s the most compelling tech project you’ve worked on, and why?
As our lives have become more connected and dependent on technology, our risk from cybercriminals and state-sponsored cyberterrorists accelerates. For example, some automobiles can now be started and even controlled from a mobile app. This is super cool, but has introduced a new way in which our lives can be impacted by bad actors. Data streaming is ubiquitous in the fight against these threats. I’ve been working on an open-source project that helps organizations look for threat patterns and anomalies in real-time streams of data. This project leverages the open standard Sigma so that it can easily be used in conjunction with any cybersecurity technology as well as enabling organizations to freely share and distribute threat detection patterns. It feels great to contribute to projects like this, which make people a little safer.
What technologies are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?
While this might seem pretty mundane, I’m very optimistic about open-source data management technologies. Open-source itself completely changed the trajectory of digital innovation because it allowed people to experiment with ideas at a low cost and avoid being locked into a single expensive vendor. This greatly accelerated the rate at which our day-to-day lives have been transformed by software.
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The next profound leap we are going to see will be fueled by our ability to cost-effectively manage and rapidly act on massive quantities of data. The generative AI explosion, for instance, would not be possible without this. We are now seeing convergence around several key open-source data technologies that will drive cost efficiency and data accessibility, spurring further innovation.
Projects like Apache Iceberg for data storage, Apache Flink for processing, and Apache Kafka for data in motion are making it easier to tap into business data and apply it to many different impactful use cases, like connecting it with LLMs, so they can provide contextually relevant and trustworthy results for customers.
On the flip side, I remain highly skeptical about the broad adoption of blockchain due to the complexity and cost of using it. There are just easier ways to achieve the same effects.
What’s the best tech-related media you read/watch/listen to?
Does it sound too sycophantic to say Tech Brew? It’s legitimately my favorite, with all those bite-size goodies delivered to my email. After all these years I still love TechCrunch and Gizmodo. Some less well-trodden paths that I enjoy are the Netflix TechBlog, the super nerdy and detailed jack-vanlightly.com, and I’m currently enjoying the Can I get that software in blue? podcast.
What’s something about you we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?
I’m an ItalophiIe who absolutely loves cooking but enjoys eating even more! Aside from data tech, role-playing games are my nerdy passion, but it’s hard to find enough playing time since I have five boys keeping me busy.
What do you think about when you’re not thinking about tech?
I spend quite a bit of time thinking about ancient languages and history and how they have flowed down into present-day cultures.