Last year I launched Irontools, a company focused on building extensions for Apache Flink.
I’ve not made many updates since then, and today I want to share that Irontools has pivoted to primarily consulting and training.
Building Irontools
I learned a lot in the past 15 months. I spent weeks reading Apache Flink source code. But also, studying database optimizations like vectorization and query compilation. WebAssembly. More Rust, Arrow and DataFusion (the RAD stack). Substrait. Lots of other things I’m forgetting.
The highlight of my work was definitely a working Flink Table API / SQL query accelerator. I shared a lot of details here if you’re curious.
And yet, I couldn’t get enough traction with it. There was some interest, but I realized that the products that I built are really hard to sell as a solopreneur. You need a relatively large team to build and maintain something that becomes a critical part of clients’ Flink deployments.
However, I plan to open-source most of my work! This is not the highest priority for me at the moment, but I’ll share updates on that front as I make progress.
Learnings
I don’t consider this experiment a failure. I learned a lot of new technologies and performance optimizations, made more progress with the RAD stack. And I have a much deeper understanding of Apache Flink, something that I’m able to apply in my consulting work. I also packaged a lot of my learnings into a training on Advanced Apache Flink, which has been very well received.
Next Steps
I’ve been primarily focused on consulting and training for the past few months. It keeps me really busy (to the point where I needed to start firing clients), so I’m not looking for any new work!
And just to clarify, this is not a new thing for me. I’ve been doing consulting for the past few years. This is what allowed me to bootstrap Irontools in the first place (working couple days a week on client work). I’m just expanding that.
It doesn’t mean that I won’t be building new products in the future. I’m just looking for the right opportunity. In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more about Apache Flink, stream processing, or data streaming in general, check out my newsletter and the Flink training. I have one more surprise project to announce soon, so stay tuned!