CRAFTING SOFTWARE LIKE AN ARTISAN
Image via WIRED
Most chefs will tell you that any meal they toil over is only as good as the company that they share it with. Two years ago, Marcel Kornacker surprised colleagues and friends when he left his bread-winning day job as Google’s chief architect to go learn how to bake bread at a professional cooking school. However, his gastronaut leanings were only an interlude to a new idea he had cooking, one that had nothing to do with calculating oven temperatures and spice combinations, and yet, somehow did have a “breaking bread” element.
About 40 miles north of his old employer’s headquarters, Kornacker joined the launch of a startup called Cloudera, a new enterprise specializing in open source software (in other words, software that’s freely available to everyone). His goal was to work on platforms similar to what he had done for Google, but in a more publicly accessible context.
After moving to Cloudera, he built Impala, which like the megalith’s query engine works with petabytes of data, or millions of gigabytes, but unlike Google, it’s open source. Like those aforementioned bakers, Kornacker crafts software with an almost artisan approach, he builds with an ultra-meticulous attention to details. And, most importantly, like any good meal, the end goal is all about sharing.
