Sometimes life is hard and it gives you lemons. Some other days it gives you way over 100 TB of JSON data, which you need to process and import. For Stefan, this challenge was an opportunity to expand his skills and make really good lemonade.
Satellite data processing & face recognition
After Stefan finished his computer science studies at JKU Linz, he took his time finishing the master thesis. It was a good call because not only he got the prestigious Adolf Adam award for it, but he was able to expand his knowledge in face recognition technology. When he was looking for a new role, his friend told him about Cloudflight and he got immediately hooked by the prospect of working on satellite data processing. From then on, it all started to fall in place.
Even though in 2013 he started working at Cloudflight as a software developer and sincerely enjoyed his projects, he always wanted to use his face recognition expertise. And if you are good at something, at Cloudflight you will get a chance to use it. So, Stefan started a brand-new project on the side to create a demo of what the technology can do. He eventually found some success with it and while this idea never became his main focus, he was thrilled to get a chance to pursue his passion.
Technical architect in the space industry
In his time with the company, Stefan was part of many projects, where he learned new skills and technologies, which allowed him to grow from his role of software developer to that of a technical architect. As a technical architect, he can support our teams in defining how the software should be built and what technologies could be used. And finally, in this role he was able to have a huge impact in his favorite field, the space industry.
A company collecting information from both terrestrial and satellite radio devices had amassed over 200TB of raw message data they needed to process and import into a database. The sheer amount of data made it incredibly difficult to even test any potential solutions, as it could take days before any irregularity would show up. Luckily Stefan and his team were eventually able to pinpoint the main issues in the processing jobs and enabled the customer to effectively leverage all the information they stored over the years. It has been an incredibly exciting journey to work on this project and get an opportunity to dive deep into the world of Apache Flink and stream processing. But Stefan’s job is not over, as he sees great potential in adding AI and machine learning solutions to this project to offer even better performance to the customer.
As a longtime volunteer paramedic Stefan has helped a lot of people in dire situations, with his cool apps, he codes in his spare time, he has put smiles on many faces, and we are really proud to be able to call him our colleague and a friend.