I’m incredibly proud of what we accomplished at Snowflake, particularly with Snowpark. Snowpark not only expands what customers and partners can do with the platform, but also provides a lot of flexibility for Snowflake itself. I expect this to pay dividends for a long time.

Moreover, the Snowpark team – and Snowflake engineering in gereral – was absolutely top notch and a joy to work with.

So why leave?

Certainly not because of the people or for lack of interesting work. Nor for doubts in the company: Snowflake is absolutley crushing it. (And as a stockholder, I look forward to them continuing to crush it.)

This was a much more personal decison. I’ve had a longstanding ambivalence towards the software industry. Software has provided me with a lot of interesting, worthwhile problems to solve, and smart, engaging people to solve them with. And it has paid the bills quite handsomly.

On the other hand, I’ve always found myself drawn to the less practical side of computing, mathematics, and the sciences – maybe it runs in the family. I was in academia once: a graduate student for all the wrong reasons, and a poor one as a result. Now I’m in a position to explore again, this time with a bit more perspective.

Exactly how will this exploration play out? I have some ideas, but the truth is that I’m not yet entirely sure.

In the short term, my plans are to take a little time off, get a little more involved in my kids’ schools, and start thinking about the future. I’ll also try to write a bit more about non-employment topics here, as well as get some pictures posted on our new family blog.

Stay tuned!

I joined Tableau in June of 2015, and spent most of my three years there starting, building, and ultimately shipping Tableau Prep. I’m incredibly proud of the Prep team, the product we put together, and the awesome functionality yet to come.

As I move on, I’ve been thinking a bit about the past projects that really excited me. In addition to Prep, my favorites were probably StreamInsight, which was a system for dealing with time-aware queries and streaming data, and the spatial types in SQL Server. (Those types are still going strong and motivating new integrations ten years later.)

A common theme through of all of these projects has been making it easy to do complex things with data. And Snowflake is most certainly out to do that with data warehousing. It feels like a wonderful match.

I’m going to miss Tableau — it’s a wonderful company — and I’m going to miss Prep. But I’m incredibly excited to be starting at Snowflake. (And a special thanks to those Preppies that slipped Snowflake support into the latest Prep release. That should save me some awkward moments.)

I’ll try to keep writing here — maybe with a broader set of topics, and hopefully with a bit more regularity. So do please check in and drop me a note.

A long time ago in a job not so far away, I kept a blog over at MSDN. Back then, I was a new program manager in SQL Server, and that blog really caught it’s wind as we were pulling together SQL Server’s geospatial support. After I left that project, things just sort of trailed off.

Over the years, I’ve considered starting up a blog again, but I’ve struggled to come up with a theme that was coherent, current, and that I could actually write about publicly.

But recently, I’ve started to think this is too high a bar. My goal with this new blog is merely to write a weekly post on something interesting to me. It’s selfish, but I hope you find it interesting enough to read along.

So buckle up—it might get bumpy.

And welcome!