Why I Joined InfluxData - Jacob Marble

By Jacob Marble / Company
Mar 28, 2018

My name is Jacob Marble, and I’m a new Influxer.

In my short career as a software engineer, I’ve worked for both BigCo and Startup, and learned volumes from each. BigCo likes systems, processes, standards, tests, specialists, chain-of-command. Startup likes nimble, scrappy, curious, pragmatic, generalist, impact. My biggest lesson so far?

I want to work with people who are (1) nice and (2) smart.

People

In my early programming days, I was impressed by the stereotypical programmer-in-a-closet. He (stereotype!) is brilliant, eats pizza, stays up late hacking, avoids people, and doesn’t care what other people think. This agrees strongly with my upbringing; my parents taught me to be independent, an attribute that I am proud of for myself and respect in others.

However, the harder I try to be an independent-whiz-kid, the more I realize that I need and enjoy interaction with people. In fact, I learn more and get more work done as a member of a team than I do alone! When I interviewed with InfluxData, I wanted to know about the people I would be working with, so I asked my interviewers questions like:

• Who do you like to work with?
• How often do you interact with people?
• What did you do before coming to InfluxData?
• What percentage of my prospective peers are remote like me?
• What are the relationships like between SWE, SRE, and PM?

In the process of interviewing with InfluxData, I interacted with four software engineers. After each interview, I felt certain that this is someone I like, and that I can learn a lot from. Influxers are nice, outgoing, and smart!

Products

I used Telegraf, InfluxDB and Chronograf before joining InfluxData. My last employer uses InfluxDB and Grafana for service metrics (and they are excited for TSI in InfluxDB 1.5) and I use InfluxDB as the central persistence engine in a side project. I’ve read a lot of the online documentation and found answers to my questions there. All this to say, I’m confident that the products are solid, and support is top-notch.

As society continues to move into the age of Big Data, the relevance of time series will only continue to grow, and before I even considered InfluxData as an employer, I knew that InfluxData is my preferred solution for time series tools.

Tech

The people and product meet the standard, but will my inner nerd find satisfaction?

My background so far is strong with tools like Java, Golang, data pipeline frameworks, and building APIs. I look forward to working with the InfluxDB storage team to leverage, grow, and apply these skills to allow our users to reduce Time to Awesome.

InfluxData uses Golang a lot. If you haven’t tried Golang yet, then you need to take a peek. For me, it’s everything good about Python (expressive syntax; small surface area; garbage collected), plus some massive advantages (no GIL; compiled).

Some of the upcoming changes in 2.0 are really cool for anyone who has worked with data pipelines. IFQL is part of 2.0, and the language itself is interesting, but the implementation is where it gets really exciting.

Most of InfluxData’s product code is open source, and most development work is open source. It isn’t always right for a business to operate like this, and it’s awesome that the model here is to give the community something useful (the TICK Stack) and let them decide when it’s time to upgrade from OSS user to SaaS customer.

Summary

I’m excited to be here at InfluxData, primarily due to the people, products and technology, in that order.

Looking for a new challenge? Drop us a line!