In April, I wrote an outline of my career. That post is already out of date, because I have a new job to add to the list.
I’m joining Confluent as a Principal Software Engineer working on Confluent Platform for Apache Flink.
I won’t try and describe what “Confluent Platform for Flink” is here. Partly because I’m sure I’ll have plenty to say about it in coming months. Mostly because I’ve got a lot to learn and anything I say today will almost certainly be incomplete or inaccurate in ways I’ll find embarrassing once I know more. In the meantime, the product page or the docs site are the best places to go if you’re curious.
But that won’t stop me speculating about what this all means for me.
What stays the same?
I still work for IBM. With IBM’s acquisition of Confluent now complete, Confluent is an IBM company. Although it doesn’t entirely feel like it, this is an internal move.
I’m in the same technology space. The product I’ll be working on is about helping companies run Apache Flink on self-managed and on-premise Kubernetes clusters, to process streams of events on Apache Kafka topics. If you keep to that high a level and squint a bit, a lot of the technology there is the same stuff I’ve been working on.
What changes?
I’ll be more focused and more hands-on. My role in Event Automation was technical leadership across a portfolio of related products: Event Streams (our Kafka distribution), Event Endpoint Management (our event governance product and the Kafka gateway we invented to enable it), Event Processing (our Flink distribution and tooling), and an event streaming capability in IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration. I was responsible for products spanning both on-prem Kubernetes and on-cloud iPaaS.
In other words, it was about breadth. My opportunities for coding were prototyping new ideas for future features and doing bits specifically related to customer projects I supported. I’m still working out exactly what my new role in Confluent will involve, but I know it’ll be more hands-on and focused on a narrower scope. I’m looking forward to this. I’ll be a proper developer again. I’ve spent too much time in meetings over the last year.
I’ll be working in a remote-first distributed team. I haven’t worked in a remote-first team since 2016. I’ve enjoyed the norm of collaborating with my team in person, pairing at the same screen or standing around the same whiteboard. There have been occasions since then where I haven’t been able to (most obviously, the pandemic), and I didn’t enjoy them. I’m nervous about this, and will make an effort to avoid feeling isolated again.
First decision on this is that I’m going to keep going into the office at IBM Hursley, even though I don’t have any work reason to.
I’ll be working on an established product. For every software product I’ve worked on since 2008, I’ve been around since day one and was a part of launching it. Confluent Platform for Apache Flink launched in December 2024.
In practice, this probably is a smaller difference than it feels like – there are always existing technologies to learn. For example, although I was a part of launching IBM’s Event Streams, it was based on Apache Kafka which was an established technology. But still… most of my career has been building and launching new products, so it feels weird to be the new guy on something already out there.
Why now?
So… exciting times!
The withdrawal of Event Automation [1] was obviously the catalyst for me needing some sort of change, but… I was overdue a change. My three-and-a-half years in Event Automation was the longest I’ve ever spent doing the same role.
(Technically, I was in IBM MQ for 3 years 10 months, but that was a graduate rotation thing moving each year between different teams across Development, Test, and Level 3 Support roles, so that didn’t feel like the same job for the whole time).
With my attention-deficit tendencies, I think I was overdue switching things up to do something a little different!
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[1] – yes, the typo in that URL makes me itch
Tags: career