Holger Hammel – why moving sideways is the way forward

Holger Hammel, VP Engineering in Product at Aiven, shares his insights on the company's engineering culture, values, and projects. Hammel highlights the importance of contribution to the code base, reliability, security, operational awareness, task automation, and end-to-end ownership of teams for product streams. He also discusses how these values translate into hiring, emphasizing high standards and a focus on open source. Hammel shares some recent projects, such as Pgvector (vector search in Postgres), event-streaming ecosystem improvements, and the introduction of free tiers for many products. These projects contribute to Aiven's mission of being the trusted open-source data platform for everyone. Hammel also discusses how Aiven supports professional development for engineering team members by encouraging exploration of different parts of the Aiven platform and learning new programming languages or technologies. He offers advice for anyone wanting to join the engineering team, emphasizing the importance of getting to know the team and code base and being open to sideways thinking.