Meet the Engineer: Dawid Wysakowicz

In this edition of our “Meet the Engineer” series, I’d like to present my data Artisans colleague Dawid Wysakowicz. Dawid is an Apache Flink committer and an avid Liverpool FC fan who made the jump and joined the data Artisans team in Berlin a few months ago. He decided to move to Berlin from Poland, where he lived and worked previously so that he could continue his pursuit of working on a large open source project in the EU and contributing to Apache Flink. I hope you enjoy learning more about Dawid in the following sections!

What do you work on at data Artisans?Since joining data Artisans a couple of months ago, I have been mostly involved with open source Apache Flink. This primarily includes my team’s work on developing further the CEP library of Apache Flink, a library that helps developers and data engineers searching and finding sequence patterns in the stream of events in Apache Flink. As an example, this allows searching for a sequence of events finding when an event B occurred after event A. I also work on other user-facing streaming APIs on Apache Flink such as the Data Stream API.

What do you enjoy about your job?Working at data Artisans is very exciting and interesting. There are different things that I enjoy about my job such as, for example overcoming exciting challenges in the stream processing space in my day-to-day. This allows me to never get bored as I always work on new issues, JIRA stories, and Flink developments, that oftentimes include problems that haven't been solved before. Another element of my job that I truly enjoy is being able to contribute to an open source project such as Apache Flink that has wide adoption by data engineers, data architects, and data scientists. This allows me to communicate with the open source community very regularly, to have a constant interaction with new people and project contributors from a diverse cultural background, and different perspectives to solving issues in Apache Flink.

Are you a contributor or committer to any Apache projects? If so, which ones? Yes, I am a committer in Apache Flink for more than a year now and have contributed to some other open source projects in the big data space, such as Apache Beam and Apache Phoenix to name a couple. I have been involved in Apache Flink from the very early days, contributing to the community since the end of 2015. My contributions over time resulted in me becoming an Apache Flink committer while I was working at my former employer as a Software / Data Engineer and I was involved in developing and maintaining the CEP Library in Apache Flink.

What do you like about Apache Flink?Apache Flink is a very exciting open source project to be part of. First and foremost, I like the fact that it’s one of the few open source projects that originated in Europe. Since I was born and completed my studies in computer science in Europe, Apache Flink is a big proof to students and young graduates from the region that European universities and computer scientists can work together in bringing technology forward not only within the EU but at a global scale. On top of that, Flink enables institutions and organizations to tackle and solve complex problems that they couldn’t necessarily solve previously and make them faster at responding to their data, that makes them more competitive and service oriented. Last but not least, from my very early days, I felt that the Apache Flink community is one of the most welcoming communities in the open source space, that provides great support to new committers and contributors with a very diverse and intelligent community base.

What is your advice for someone who is interested in participating in an open source project for the first time?If you are new to open source and want to start contributing to different projects, my advice would be to not be afraid! Once you have discovered an issue that you can fix, create a pull request in Github. And even if you don’t know how to resolve such an issue, make sure to check the documentation on the project page that has information on how you can start committing or contributing to the project.

How did you get into programming?As a kid, I liked Maths and participated in different mathematics competitions in Poland throughout elementary school and high school. I soon realized that I liked logical thinking and problem-solving which made computer programming and software development the closest discipline to what I enjoyed. This motivated me to study Computer Science at the Warsaw University of Technology where I completed my computer science degree and studied all programming environments and languages before working with C for payment terminals and later on with Java and streaming technologies.

What’s your favorite sport/hobby and why?I am a big Liverpool Football Club fan, watching pretty much all of their games, following news about them and quite recently I watched live one of their football games in Anfield stadium in Liverpool. It was an amazing experience seeing my favorite team playing live on the field and one that I am planning to repeat very soon in the future! I’ve also recently started paragliding around Europe and the Middle East, in places such as Croatia, Greece, Slovenia, Israel. One of the most amazing experiences for me was paragliding over the Golan Hills (which are minefields) on the border of Israel, Syria, and Jordan.Where are you from? Tell us something about where you grew up or some memories from childhood.I was born in Gdańsk in Poland but I grew up in a small city in the east part of the country called Łomża. It’s one of the greenest areas in Poland, and even if it’s a small city it is very famous for its beer production and beer exports industry (you might have seen the Łomża Export trademark in a local bar near you).

You can follow Dawid on Twitter @dwysakowicz, Github, and LinkedInWe’re hiring!Check out the data Artisans careers page to learn about open positions. We have roles based in our Berlin office as well as in the U.S.