Vincent Koc currently serves as the Head of Data for hipages Group where he is spearheading data across data analytics, data engineering and data science. With over a decade of experience in the field, Vincent has worked across a wide range of industries, including finance, telecommunications, travel, and fast-moving consumer goods.
Vincent is passionate about the expanding developments in the field of data and empowering the next generation of data practitioners, and is a frequent presenter at International and Australian conferences. He also is a guest lecturer and mentor at numerous universities in Australia and the US.
Giving back is in Vincent's DNA, outside of work, he volunteers as a first responder with NSW State Emergency Services and St John Ambulance.
How/when did you first discover Airbyte? What was your Aha moment? About a year ago, my team and I were investigating various ingestion tools and we decided to use Airbyte because other ingestion tools were cost prohibitive as we wanted to leverage kubernetes environment and Airbyte could be self-hosted. It was in the early stages of Airbyte and since then the product has come a long way.
What is your top tip for using Airbyte that others may not know? The low-code connectors . Any developer or technical person can easily build a connector (most of the time, as some sources are complex) using YAML to turn a RESTFUL API into an Airbyte connector. This enables anyone to quickly and easily add that “i wish it had this connector” and support the development of the product.
What have you worked on in the past six months that you’re particularly proud of? Helping review and finalize a PR to support Avro on the Kafka connector. I was surprised at how many organizations were waiting for this one PR as their stack was heavily reliant on Kafka.
Favorite Airbyte slack channel: #announcements - It’s great to see all the releases and updates to the products, there’s at least one major update a week.
We can’t thank you enough for your contributions. Can you tell us any learnings you’ve had along the way contributing to Airbyte so far? Why did you decide to contribute? Why is open source important to you? Open source is very important to me because it is my way of “giving back” and supporting open technologies and standards. I love to support open standards, technologies and open source development. I believe in the power of community and helping be part of the community to shape that product or experience. By contributing to Airbyte, I was able to strengthen my advanced Python skills as well as get a glimpse in the data pipelines and data stacks that many organizations are using. It’s been great to get my hands dirty (so to speak) into the code and help fine-tune my skills. Contributing is a great way to increase your skills and expertise.
Tip for first time contributors? Don’t be scared, have a go at fixing or adding something. It can seem complex at the start, but there is a whole community of other like minded individuals who are willing to help. Feel free to ask questions and join the conversation on Slack. The Airbyte team is also really responsive, they’re always around to help.
Vincent giving a talk this year at CDO Sit-Down Looking to the distant future, what is the technology that you’re most excited about and that you think holds a lot of promise? Many things have changed in the realm of technology and especially in data. I am excited with the next wave of machine learning and artificial intelligence and what this means for data ingestion and processing, the role of data engineers could never be more important.
A few fun facts: Most used emoji 😎 Dogs or cats? 🐱 Favorite podcast/ or person/account on twitter to follow for data ecosystem info? A few of my top picks include:
Have a nomination? If someone has helped you in the community, we want to hear about it. Ping me in slack @Karen Bajza-Terlouw.
🌊 you out there!
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