Why I’m Joining Alvin
Thoughts on a personal journey into the modern world of data governance and DataOps.
In April of 2021, I chose to leave a 10 year job at CI&T and join a nascent startup company as their first hire. In this post, I share how my personal journey mixed up with these two crazy dudes from Norway and England and their pioneering tech to solve some exciting problems in the space.
Earlier this year, I was enjoying some vacation time and a good friend of mine sent me this blog post — I am an avid writer on medium, and I love to both consume and create community content.
When I read it, I thought to myself… there is something different here, why haven’t I felt this way before? There are few blog posts that connect to you on a profound level, and this one was one of them.
After working as a Google Cloud partner for a few years, and more specifically taming the "metadata dragon" in the wild, that blog post got my attention. And what does this “metadata dragon” taming look like I hear you ask? A little something like this:
This experience comes from helping enterprise customers and the community get started with Google Cloud Data Catalog: open-source connectors, walkthrough tutorials, blog posts, and solution designs. This metadata space and enterprise world is a pretty fierce dragon unless you know what you’re doing.
On the plus side, all that hard work helped me achieve 7 Google Cloud certifications. They’re not quite as scary as the metadata dragon above 😂 so reach out on Linkedin if you need any help with those.
Finding your fuel
I find myself someone that is really curious about the space, like sometimes I just wonder and reflect myself… what direction is this space going? What's the next generation of data governance going to look like?
We saw a big shift from monolith applications going to microservices, DevOps or DevSecOps practices becoming a must-have. And now this emerging trend of DataOps solutions is getting more and more attention.
The data governance space is full of robust and enterprise-ready solutions bundled with features and costly monthly bills, so when I saw that blog post talking about a plug-and-play solution that automates key aspects of the data governance journey — that seriously got me interested.
In my experience working with enterprise customers, I saw that there isn’t a good solution out there that really solves some of the most technically challenging problems in the space, like lineage. Having a really solid tech foundation, based on open-source components, and a focus on automation is definitely the way to go. And this is what I saw at Alvin.
The final thing that got to me, was being able to connect with the community through Alvin in the open-source world, its medium publication, and much more to come :)
Working With Talented, Compassionate People
Then I get to know the two founders (Martin and Dan). And our experiences and passion about the space overlap in so many ways, like how excited they are when talking about the product, their view, and the cool tech behind it. I also got to see a demo and things were really smooth and impressive.
It’s only been a few weeks, but since the beginning, I felt that I belong here. And I’m excited for the future and to be able to tell the story of how a Brazilian, a Norwegian and a Brit got together to build something great!
Culture is one of those intangible qualities that can make a company special, and I feel that we have a good thing going here :)
What I Hope to Accomplish
Ultimately my goal is to be in a place where I get a chance to improve the way people work with data, and I believe Alvin is the right place for it! We are committed to building Alvin with the input of the data engineering community. So we’ll decide together what to build next!
Thanks for reading this, and hearing my thoughts!
Want to give Alvin a try ?
Alvin is helping data teams of all sizes meet the challenges of data quality, reliability, cost and governance. Get started for free here and unleash the power of highly accurate lineage and usage data.
