Alex Gallego was born and raised in Colombia. He has always identified as a builder, and as a kid, he would help his Uncle re-build dirt bike engines, and was the kid that would take apart his friend's computer when they weren't looking. Once he arrived in the US, his Dad got a computer, which started his love for tech and cryptography. Outside of tech, he is married with three boys, so his time is consumed with being present with his boys, to which he stated he loves being a Dad. Beyond that, he enjoys mentally reseting by doing mountain biking and road cycling. Alex was working with a large dataset in ad tech. After this startup did well, he was hooked, he went on to build a computing framework, which eventually sold to Alkamai. During his time at that company, he started playing with squeezing every bit of compute out of hardware - and decided to combine this in order to optimize storage. This is the creation story of Redpanda. Our Sponsors: * Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.com * Check out Red Hat: https://www.redhat.com * Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/CODESTORY Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy