tl;dr: I’m joining to the Google’s Cloud Spanner team and I’ll use this medium to document my day-to-day work on the team to share insights about Spanner.

Over the last few months, I was trying establish a work style where we can be more instrumental on big-picture blockers and design problems for our customers. There is a strong affinity between data problems and overall architectural tradeoffs. This led me to think I should focus my work on stateful aspects and collaborate more often with storage systems folks at Google because of the potential overlap. Even though I haven’t produced any results, reaching out to other teams led me to a completely different opportunity on the Spanner team.

As an existing user of Spanner, I’m extremely excited for this opportunity. Spanner is a unique piece of our infrastructure, a first in distributing data at global scale while supporting consistent distributed transactions. Our cloud product has adoption from wide range of customers, users are coming to Spanner regardless of their cloud provider. At Google, Spanner is our irreplaceable building block.

Spanner is an established project with some of the most talented people. My role will be uniquely on building things around Spanner to make it more accessible. I’ll initially focus on:

• Contributing ORM integrations and framework support.
• Working on perf, benchmarking and debugging tools.
• Building migration tools.
• Working on probes, prototyping and evaluation projects.
• Helping users with design tradeoffs, discovering strengths and limitations.
• Sharing insights and implementation details.

Spanner is lucky to have existing ecosystem and users who are already building open source integrations and tools. I’m happy that our team will provide support and visibility for these projects as well.

I started this medium to document the most interesting aspects of our day-to-day work, our progress and stuff that hasn’t been captured before. I’m planning to establish strong relations with some of our users for collaboration. Stay tuned for more!

One more thing…

My snarky fashion act became a reality. There has been a number of people who were asking for this t-shirt. Now, I have the perfect opportunity to ask the team to make it our official swag.