Joining InfluxData and the future of time-series data

Posted by: Michael Hall 5 years ago

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Joining Influx

After supporting developer relations for the Linux Foundation's LF Edge projects for the past 18 months, I've decided to get back into Community Management. So I'm excited that next year I will be joining the team at InfluxData helping them build a community around the software they are developing. Anybody who knows me knows how big I am about advocating for Open Source Software, both from an engineering and community perspective, and InfluxData has a number of solid open source products they develop, such as InfluxDB & Telegraf, each with a large user community already. I see an opportunity here to build and grow that community into a driving force behind these products, working together with InfluxData to enhance them to meet the next generation of engineering needs coming with the Internet of Things and Edge computing.

One if the things that made InfluxData stand out as a company I wanted to work with was the level of excitement, passion, and most importantly humanity that I felt when talking to everybody there. Almost everyone I talked to, from the CEO to PeopleOps to Engineers, talked about the company's principles of working together, with humility, and not being afraid of failure. It wasn't just window dressing, everybody there embraced those values and it came through in how happy and excited they were about their jobs. And of course it didn't hurt that I'll be working again with Rick Spencer and Will Cooke, both good friends from our time working together on Ubuntu.

Flux language

For me, one of the most exciting things coming out of InfluxData right now is their Flux language. I first heard about Flux at AllThingsOpen 2019, where David Simmons used it in his presentation. I was immediately struck by how useful it was to have a language designed for processing streams of time-series data, not just with InfluxDB, but when doing anything at all with IoT sensors and computing on the edge. At the time I was interested to know if it could be used as a generic programming language, independently of InfluxDB, because the EdgeX Foundry project was looking for a replacement to their legacy rules-engine service. So I was especially excited to find out during my interviews that this is precisely the future that InfluxData has in mind for it, and they want that future to be community-powered!

Be a part of the community

Interviewing with InfluxData has been one of the most pleasant and efficient interviewing processes of my life, and I've had a lot of them. I think this is a good reflection of the culture they've built inside the company, and the culture they want to bring to the community around it as well. I'm really looking forward to the opportunity they are creating, and being able to bring the community into that opportunity. There's no doubt that IoT & Edge are beginning to transform our industry in the same way that the Cloud did 10 years ago, and time-series data is at the heart of that. If you're already in this space, or interested in joining it to stay on the leading edge of the digital transformation, come and join us!

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