Alex James

Background

About Alex James

I'm currently an Architect at Splunk, owning large parts of the Search and Search Language technical vision. I’m the driving force behind SPL2, a modern data processing language designed to unify batch and stream processing while blending the familiarity of SQL with the iterative and intuitive nature of Splunk’s traditional search language. I design language features, prioritize strategic initiatives, mentor engineers, set design principals and guide the development of conceptual models that align cross functional teams and simplify company wide initiatives to make what we do feel more approachable for customers. All while unlocking the hidden value of metadata, helping Splunk scale to truly massive data volumes and blending batch and stream paradigms, semantics and libraries.Before getting into Big Data I was a Principal Technical Program Manager at Microsoft driving the OData (OData.org) protocol forward. While working on OData I drove protocol enhancements and was the primary architect of the OData WebApi stack. I also helped create the Microsoft wide Azure REST Guidelines. Before OData I was a Program Manager on the Entity Framework team working on EF4 and in particular the paradigm shift to a Code First meta model.Prior to all that I worked as an independent consultant in New Zealand for 9 years, spending much of the last 4 years of that time working on my own start-up creating a Tagging File System (XTend) and a Relational File System / Object Relational Mapper (Base4).All up I've been programming and designing solutions professionally since 1995.I love pushing the envelop of what is possible with computer systems. Most of my passions lie in the areas of Metadata, Data, Services, REST and File Systems.My goal is that one day I won't have to explain to my mum how to find things on her computer.Specialties: Dreaming up novel solutions, Re-imagining software, Architecture, Influencing, Presenting, Educating, Research and Development, Project Management, Programming, Analysis, Design, Requirements Gathering and getting to the essence of problems.