The Art of Trying

In 2018, I finished a full Ironman triathlon — and ever since, I’ve been hooked on different sports and events. Back then, I had no clue what triathlon was. It sounded scary. And doing a full Ironman? Even scarier. Naturally, people get less scared when they’re with someone else.

My take on building a data culture

I gave a talk on Data Mesh and Data Products last September 25, 2025. As usual, we ended with a Q&A—and one person raised their hand: "Thanks for the presentation. It seems you’re doing really great at SumUp. How did you build the data culture

A Week of Incident, Learning, and Relief

The Most Expensive Mistake (for now) I probably made the most expensive engineering mistake of my life. (Remind me in five years to revisit this post again if it’s still the most expensive one.) It was one of those incidents that rarely happen, the kind that throws you into

When Data Mesh become as mess

Last week, I spoke at a trivago meetup about SumUp's Data Mesh journey from the perspective of our Data Platform team. I highlighted a few non-technical changes we made along the way: ✅ Hiring and upskilling towards software and backend engineering, not just data engineering ✅ Doubling down on developer

I tried vibe coding a website

I spend most of my day dealing with data platforms—SQLs, Snowflake tables, Kafka incidents here and there. Things that don’t really care if the button has rounded corners or not. But recently, I started vibecoding a passion project (more info soon). Not because I want to pivot into

The next Data Engineering change I am looking forward to

Note: originally published in 2022 in my medium blog and still very relevant in the ever-evolving data space. In my last 3 companies, I started to get more involved in hiring Data Engineers. Every interview is different and unpredictable. But one thing is for sure, there is always a point

The Many Data Problem: Is Your Company Struggling with too much Data?

Big Data. This was the hot topic back then that a lot of engineers had to solve. When I started my career in 2012, processing terabytes of data was a challenge. We had limited compute power that could fit our on-premise setup. Nowadays, it wouldn’t be surprising to see

How I got into Data Engineering

Presented in DataMasters Episode 9 : Data Journeys Unplugged How it started vs how it’s going I started my career way back in September 2012 as an Application Developer in IBM. I applied to 100s of jobs through jobstreet and monster. There was no LinkedIn before so we had to