Catchup 2012-2014

Two years since the last blog post. The last entry was „Farewell Bay Area“ written when I left the Bay Area after the internship.

Let’s catchup:

When I arrived at the airport on August 1st 2012, the first call was to colleague to ask about the state of the dedupv1 project, just to hear that it was killed for all intents and purposes during the three months of the internship. Very sad, but not having to write code that "actually works" gave me time and freedom to experiment. The other insight was to use trace-driven simulations instead of the real system for early prototyping of research ideas. The result was a nice paper chain: November 2012 (Supercomputing, Salt Lake City, Utah), February 2013 (FAST, San Jose, CA, to my knowledge the first European PhD student ever presenting at FAST), July 2013 (SYSTOR, Haifa, Israel) and two more not so important/good papers. Having the final paper at SYSTOR in Haifa was awesome because I could end my academic publication career at the venue where I started it in 2009 and the BLC approach presented there has been IMHO my best work (yet ;-)). Graduation in May 2013.

I joined Greenplum where I did my internship. It had now joined forced with other parts of EMC and VMware in a company called Pivotal in June 2013. Let’s make a long story short: I love the product (GPDB). It has great potential. MPPs in general (Massive Parallel Databases) are increasingly the way to go for Big Data analytics. The potential of the 1990’s research is now finally materializing. Also, lots of new innovation happening in the field. However, Pivotal was not my place anymore. Greenplum will always be important to me because they were the first where that have me a chance. I left in October after finishing the project to join Pure Storage in November 2013. Back in (block) storage and Pure is awesome.

I have been working from the London sales office since November. I like England. On good days, it feels like a cultural mixture of the US and Europe that I like. It is mixing „individualism with universal healthcare„ as a friend on mine worded it. Politically/philosophically I have always been more influenced by British authors (Locke, Smith, Mill, Popper, Keynes,....) than continentals/Germans (Hegel, Marx, Adorno, Heidegger, ....).

As I evidently researched and published a lot data deduplication and this kind of technologies are important for Pure and (some more reasons and some persistence), we have been able to petition of a visa. In three weeks I am going to say „Hello again, Bay Area“. Let’s start a new chapter....