Well, it's a bittersweet moment when I announce this. Today marks a milestone as I wrap up my time at FUGA. It's been around three years since I joined the company, and honestly, it's been an amazing ride. Though, as all good things come to an end, it is time for me to start a new adventure.
Beginning
Landing a job at FUGA felt like stepping into something different. Music tech isn't exactly what you imagine when you think about traditional software engineering. I remember my first days trying to understand how music distribution actually works. Labels, artists, digital service providers, royalties, metadata - it's a whole ecosystem that most people never think about when they hit play on Spotify. But behind every stream, there's a whole chain of data flowing through systems (like FUGA), and there's always a lot more to learn :).
The Hackathon that changed things for me (a lot)
One of the highlights was definitely the AI hackathon we had in late 2023 (was around 9months from when I joined the company). Me, Luke, and Pierre-Louis ended up building WaveQuery which is a text-to-SQL tool that won the award at demo day. The idea was simple: what if you could just ask questions in plain English and get SQL queries back? This was around the time that chatgpt became a thing, and working with GPT models felt genuinely novel.
We built a working prototype that could understand natural language queries and translate them into SQL. You could ask a question in Slack and get the result back in Slack. Looking back, that hackathon planted seeds that would grow into something much bigger later on. The learnings from WaveQuery directly influenced how I approached AI features in DataKit and OpenSheet. Sometimes (if not always) the coolest projects start as weekend experiments with friends who just want to build something fun to use.
The people
Short and simple: super nice folks across all departments. The kind of people who make you actually look forward to every meetings and gatherings. Just genuinely talented and kind people.
What's next, you ask?
Stay tuned! I will share soon ;)
P.S. 1 - If you want to see what came out of those WaveQuery learnings, check out DataKit - it's what happens when you take a hackathon idea and actually run with it.
P.S. 2 - Here's Luke's LinkedIn post about that hackathon if you want to see what it looked like.