The Force

Through my career as a software engineer, I've always felt drawn to data. Modeling it, manipulating it, mining it: anything having to do with the structure and use of concepts in software, really. It's an amazing (and important) area to work in, because understanding a problem's data is often the biggest step towards solving it.

Recently, I finished my Masters Degree at UT, and wrote a thesis about some new-fangled database design strategies that got noticed by a few folks. One group who noticed was a company I've long admired: San Francisco-based Salesforce.com, which creates online ("cloud") software for businesses. They've essentially built a "meta database," where their customers directly interact with database concepts, without needing a programmer to make it happen. Salesforce brought me out to do a technical talk about data design in non-relational databases, and I had a great experience meeting and talking with the team.

So it is with great excitement that I can now share that I've been hired by Salesforce.com to join the core engineering team, and work on the next generation of really tough data problems, and–hopefully–make the world a better place. I plan on taking advantage of Salesforce's 1/1/1 policy to not only design and develop advances to data in the enterprise, but also to extend that work to non-profits who are themselves tackling even bigger problems, and can use all the help they can get taming and understanding their own data.

I'll continue blogging personal stuff here, but probably not much about my work, since, as a part of a public company, I can't discuss internal stuff without working through the standard communication channels. Besides which, I'll be up to my ears in java code, and you probably don't want to hear all about that. :)