Why I Joined InfluxDB - Rick Spencer

By Rick Spencer / Company
Sep 05, 2019

The startup where I was working exited through an acquisition, leaving me with some personal choices to make. I could find a role within the tech giant that purchased us and start climbing that corporate ladder, take some time off, found my own startup, or join a new company. I kicked these options around for weeks, and after discussions with my wife and consultations with friends, I decided on the fourth option, getting a new job.

My job search went well. I focused on what I think are the 3 components to loving your job:

• What you do
• How you do it
• Who you do it with

InfluxData (creator of InfluxDB) really won on all these counts.

I am always at my best when my end users are developers. I enjoy finding ways of making hard programming problems easy and fun for developers to solve. InfluxDB solves really important and interesting problems for developers. More importantly, I have always admired how Paul Dix (founder and CTO of InfluxData) focuses the whole company on making great experiences for developers. I was excited to help him and the rest of the company take this into the next phase. So, “what you do” got a big check mark for me.

In terms of “how you do it,” I became infatuated with open source, as it is my vastly preferred way to work and is a central theme in my career. Being part of open source communities is deeply fun and satisfying to me, so InfluxData was a very good match for me. I love Influx’s commitment to a Community Open Source development approach, and I jumped at the opportunity to be part of the wider open source communities in which Influx operates.

Finally, I got to know some of the InfluxData team over a year ago, and kept in touch since. I have always really liked everyone I met. Everyone obviously cares about each other as people, not just cogs in a company, and that warmth comes through in almost every interaction I have had. The people that I met were all super smart as well as caring.

So, there you have it. Influx has it all for me, so it was not a particularly hard decision to join. I am eager to start executing on the vision of InfluxDB Cloud 2.0, to help spread the Flux language to other projects and communities, and helping the team members with their goals and aspirations as well.

I am always happy to talk to anyone in the Influx community, so you can reach me by email, or find me on the Influx or Kubernetes Slack server, where I go by rickspence3.