Starting a new chapter: RelationalAI

Some of you may have seen one of my recent tweets that left a big question hanging in the air: Dude, what are you doing next??

I'm excited to announce today is my first official day working at RelationalAI! I've walked through a lot of the story here with various people over the last month or two, but thought some might find it interesting to hear the full story about how I ended up here.

Flashback 10 years: I'm a fresh-faced recent undergraduate working as a data analyst for a big-box retail company (Sears/Kmart for those who remember :rip:). The analysis I'm working on becomes more and more complex until at one point, I'm literally baby-sitting R scripts that take 18 hours to run, praying there are no hiccups halfway through. Around the same time, I see a tech news article about this new language: Julia. It's main selling point? Low-level performance with high-level syntax. Hey, that's exactly what I could use! I spent the weekend reading the manual, getting it installed, and getting my feet wet. Come Monday, I start rewriting my R script in Julia and lo and behold, it runs in 5 minutes! I'm incredulous at first, double checking that I didn't accidentally short-circuit or something, but sure enough, it worked correctly. Needless to say, I was hooked. I would go on to write my 1st two Julia packages, ODBC.jl and CSV.jl to aid in my data loading/analysis work.

My next chapter took me to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh for a master's degree. Such an amazing environment! So fun to be around so many data science pioneers and as a bonus, get to use Julia in so many classes! More than once, I had a TA ask specifically how I got my code to run so fast for an assignment when peers' code took 2-5x longer.

Post-Pittsburgh, I joined Domo, first as a technical consultant, then moving over as a full-time developer on the product platform. About 3 years into my time at Domo, I got my first offer to work on Julia full-time. I wasn't ready. Julia felt like a bit of a risky bet at the time to base my career on full-time, and I had only been an official software engineer for a year or two. So even though I had been using and now developing Julia on the side for 4-5 years, I passed on the opportunity.

Flash forward to about 3 months ago. I had been at Domo about 7 years now, and was a comfortable senior level engineer, verging on principal/staff. I've continued to work on Julia as a hobby over the years, accumulating a suite of "fundamental" packages that I wrote/maintained in the Julia package ecosystem, including HTTP.jl, CSV.jl, JSON3.jl, and many other data format/ingestion/loading packages. I had also been starting to feel the "Bilbo effect" of being butter spread over too much bread. I had so much I wanted to work on with all these packages, but as a hobby, just didn't have the time/energy to execute. So even though I loved Domo, my team, and how much I had learned and been able to work on, the prospect of finding a way to work on Julia full-time started to really capture my interest.

I decided to put out a few "feelers" to friends/colleagues that worked at "Julia shops" and see what opportunities were available. The 3 opportunities I seriously considered were Julia Computing, Beacon Biosignals, and RelationalAI. Let me say it here: there are some awesome opportunities to work with Julia out there these days. Honestly, it was a difficult process to try and pick between the three because they all seemed like such great opportunities. All having recent fund-raising rounds, all needing Julia expertise and for someone to work on fundamental Julia packages, all having strong growth and exciting futures. It was also difficult because I have really strong connections and would really love working with the folks I know at these places. In the end, I guess it came down to a few things that tipped the scales in RelationalAI's favor:

• Strong fund-raise
• Strong product/platform that resonates with my personal career/interests; the prospect of working on a disruptive, nextgen database system applicable for anyone is really exciting
• Being able to talk with RAI's CEO, Molham, was such a pleasure; grounded, pragmatic, steady, highly technical while also sharing strong vision for the future. (I'm also hoping we get to catch an AUDL game together at some point!)

"So what are you going to be doing for them?" My official title is "Julia Ecosystem Engineer" and that sums it up pretty well! Relational currently uses a lot the packages that I've written/maintain and hence need support improving things, fixing bugs, and managing dependencies. In addition, there are many "internal" packages that don't really need to be internal that they'd like help open-sourcing, and hey, I'm pretty good at open-sourcing stuff! While I'm stoked about being able to spend more time on open-source, I'm also excited about learning and supporting the Relational platform as well, so we'll see how things evolve in the future!

If you couldn't tell, I'm really excited; excited to start the next chapter in my career, to work with Julia full-time, and to push Relational forward to new heights! Big thanks to all those who have supported and helped me along the way, and never hesitate to ping me on Twitter to chat about anything/everything.