By Splunk June 23, 2010
The first time I came into Splunk’s office I knew it was a place that I wanted to work. As I sat on the couch and chatted with co-founder and CTO Erik Swan (aka “Boss”) I noticed three movies on the coffee table: Hackers, Office Space, and The Big Lebowski. I instantly knew it would be a good fit. After a few interviews, Splunk agreed and decided to hire a red-haired fire artist with InstallShield experience despite the compromising SXSW photos. I joined the engineering team and took over the task of authoring, updating, and everything else regarding the Windows Installer for Splunk.
Over the last month I’ve quickly come up to speed on the Splunk platform, constantly amazed at the amount of information you can glean from it. It seems like every day there’s some new way to use Splunk that someone has come up with whether it’s tracking World Cup twittering, mapping the ocean floor, or analyzing the spike of profanity in code check-ins right before a release. The Splunk engineers are crazy smart and continue to build Splunk in a way that makes it as flexible as can be. While I guess you could say they’re paying me to say how great Splunk is, even if they weren’t I’d still be spouting off like a fanboy.
Anyone familiar with the Splunk product knows it’s great. What many don’t know is how great the company Splunk itself is. Since I joined the engineering team on the South Side (aka the side that looks like a frat house) I’ve learned how to curl, enjoyed free lunches, suffered defeat in the first round of the shuffleboard tournament, refreshed my Hadouken skills on the Gamerator running Street Fighter II, won (and lost) at beer pong, and cheered on my favorite countries in the World Cup with the rest of the office. I’ve also sat across from a life-sized cut out of Seven of Nine (she now shares a desk with Boss), acquired 4 monitors for maximum productivity, and chatted about bringing my hand held flamethrower propane powered flame effect to work. Needless to say, when I heard the Splunk was on the list of Best Places to Work in the Bay Area I wasn’t surprised in the least.
So yeah, this post is mostly about me bragging about the awesome company and incredibly useful product that I’m now proud to be a part of. Sorry about that. You don’t have to just be jealous though, we are hiring. Future posts from me will hopefully contain more technical substance, most likely revolving around the Windows Installer, but I reserve the right to continue to post about how great life at Splunk is.
-Ed
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Thanks!
Ed Hunsinger