Developer on Fire

Episode 429 | Paul Dix - Solving For Real Needs

Jun 24 '19

Guest:

Paul Dix talks with Dave Rael about geeking out, open source, time series data, running a business, and finding a market

Paul is the creator of InfluxDB. He has helped build software for startups, large companies and organizations like Microsoft, Google, McAfee, Thomson Reuters, and Air Force Space Command. He is the series editor for Addison Wesley’s Data & Analytics book and video series. In 2010 Paul wrote the book Service Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails for Addison Wesley’s. In 2009 he started the NYC Machine Learning Meetup, which now has over 7,000 members. Paul holds a degree in computer science from Columbia University.

Chapters:

0:15 - Dave introduces the show and Paul Dix
5:16 - Paul's experience in software testing
7:59 - Starting a business, motivation, writing code, and impact
11:45 - The story of InfluxDB - origins, identifying a market need, open source notoriety, and becoming a viable business
21:10 - The nature of InfluxDB and the use cases it serves
26:17 - Paul's experience with building teams and an organization and distributed teams
30:50 - Paul's story of failure - building a product without a market
35:20 - Paul's book recommendations
40:00 - The ongoing value of technical books and Paul's approach to using them
43:04 - The things that have Paul most excited
46:32 - Paul's top 3 tips for delivering more value
48:17 - Keeping up with Paul

Paul's book recommendation:

Paul's top 3 tips for delivering more value:

Become good at expressing yourself through writing
Ask why and understand the motivations behind a request to truly understand the need
Optimize for the productivity of your user

Episode source