Jean-Yves Stephan is a co-founder at Data Mechanics, a Cloud-Native Spark Platform - deployed on a Kubernetes cluster inside their customers' cloud account. Prior to Data Mechanics, he was a software engineer leading the Spark infrastructure team at Databricks. JY is passionate about making Spark 10x more developer-friendly and cost-effective.
In your work with technology, what is the task, situation, setup when you’re the happiest and in the flow? I’m the co-founder of Data Mechanics, a cloud-native spark platform focused on data engineering use cases. I’ve been working with Apache Spark for about 6 years now. I’m happiest when I work with our customers around questions like how to scale their data pipelines and their organisation, all the while reducing their costs. On the technical side this implies data architecture (storage, compute) questions as well as Spark performance tuning and helping data teams excel with a Docker-based, Kubernetes-powered workflow. And on the human side it means working with usually passionate and clever individuals, and help them build cool use cases around Spark.
What was the most positive thing you realized, or that just happened to you, during the pandemic? On the professional side, our startup was acquired by Spot by NetApp, and we’re now integrating Data Mechanics with Spot.io, which will gives our customers plenty of new exciting features around infrastructure optimisation, cost visualisations and controls, and enterprise-grade security and infrastructure control. On the personal side, I got married, and we managed to get a big group of friends and families safely together despite the pandemic. It was magical!
Should we stay online, go all-in for in-person, or do a hybrid setup next year? Which one do you personally prefer? At Data Mechanics and at Spot.io, we’re a remote-first company. That means we hire people in different countries and cities. We also have some offices - for example a Paris office where some of our team members (including me) enjoy the office life (typically 2 days per week as far as I’m concerned). So we are big defenders of the remote and flexible workstyle. Even for team members who work mostly remotely, we have regular in-person events (for some of them every month, for some of them every quarter), as obviously nothing it’s important to create bonds by spending time physically together - sharing a meal, doing an in-person white board session, or an escape game.
We are happy to invite you to the 9th conference Scale By the Bay!
Format: Online Dates: 28th-29th of October 2021
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