Last month, I spoke at the Iceberg meetup at Snowflake HQ. Public speaking has never been my favorite, and knowing Snowflake CEO Sridhar and Tabular C

on the San Francisco Iceberg meetup

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2024-10-09 01:30:02

Last month, I spoke at the Iceberg meetup at Snowflake HQ. Public speaking has never been my favorite, and knowing Snowflake CEO Sridhar and Tabular CEO Ryan were in the audience didn’t help.

It was day 18 of starting Mooncake Labs, and I spoke about a general indexing framework for Iceberg. You can find the details here. Here were some of my learnings:

I spent the last decade building a proprietary database. Every time a feature request came in, engineering and product leaders would spend hours prioritizing its impact. Almost every time, it boiled down to one question: How much ARR?

I watched my best engineers spend months building awkward hooks and extensions that didn’t fit the bigger picture. I often thought, 'Just the customer to make a PR :)' The end product of this type prioritization process tends to look like:

The Iceberg community feels very different. There's a clear end goal, with contributors and users working side by side. Developer experience is at the center, which feels refreshing—like the right way to build things people love.