Data Mesh People to Follow

Zhamak Dehghani – CEO and Founder at Stealth Startup (LinkedIn; Twitter): If you follow anyone in the data mesh space, it should be the creator of the data mesh paradigm herself 😀 Grab her book, check out her episodes on Data Mesh Radio, and get ready for something really interesting from her startup.

Yes, there is a break between Zhamak and everyone else…

Max Schultze – Data Engineering Manager at Zalando (LinkedIn): Max is a frequent prolific presenter about Zalando’s data mesh journey and also has delivered training through O’Reilly. He has probably delivered more data mesh content than anyone besides Zhamak and Scott. Search for his presentations on YouTube, there are MANY.

Nick Heudecker – Senior Director, Market Strategy & Competitive Intelligence at Cribl (LinkedIn; Twitter): Nick has been covering the data space broadly for years including as an analyst at Gartner. He hosts the Data Mesh Learning vendor interview series as seen here.

Eric Broda – President, Broda Group Software Inc (a consulting company; LinkedIn; Twitter; Medium): Eric has implemented Data Mesh at large financial services firms and uses that experience in many articles on Medium/Twitter across many data mesh topics; he also very actively interacts/answers questions on the community Slack.

Samia Rahman – Director of Enterprise Data Strategy and Governance at Seagen (LinkedIn): Samia presented multiple times about data mesh while at Thoughtworks where she worked on multiple data mesh implementations and was the person to interview Zhamak specifically about her book. She is a key leader of the data mesh implementation at Seagen.

Andrew Padilla – Founder at Datacequia (a consulting company; LinkedIn): Andrew is the editor of the Data Mesh Learning Newsletter and worked with a customer on their implementation re data mesh. He is included here for asking very good questions in the DML Slack.

Jean-Georges Perrin (JGP) – Intelligence Platform Lead at PayPal (LinkedIn; Twitter; YouTube; Blog): JGP is the author of Spark in Action but more recently has been focused on sharing his insights from building out a platform for data mesh inside PayPal including articles, video presentations, and podcasts.

Paolo Platter – CTO at Agile Lab (a consulting company specialized; LinkedIn): Paolo has written multiple articles about Data Mesh and with his team is driving several Data mesh implementation at large enterprises since 2020. He is also quite active in the community and on LinkedIn answering questions. Creator of an open Data Product Specification.

Emily Gorcenski – Head of Data and AI at Thoughtworks Germany (LinkedIn): Emily is involved in many data mesh implementations as the head of data and AI work for Thoughtworks. She has been involved in multiple pieces of data mesh content across articles, webinars/presentations, and podcasts.

Piethein Strengholt, Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft (LinkedIn; Medium): if not winner for the coolest name (that goes to Zhamak), a close second. Piethein has published multiple articles since moving to Microsoft on his Medium and previously on how ABN AMRO implemented a distributed domain driven data architecture and is also the author of the O’Reilly book Data Management at Scale.

Wannes Rosiers – Product Manager at Raito (LinkedIn): Wannes wrote multiple articles and presented multiple times on what DPG Media is doing with data mesh when he lead the data function there. He is now at a company looking to offer a product compatible with a data mesh approach.

Roberto Coluccio – Data Architect at Agile Lab (LinkedIn): Roberto is the author of several data mesh related articles and is an active member of the community on Slack. He is the organizer of the Italian Data Mesh community and helping several companies to implement data mesh.

Olivier Wulveryck – Consulting Manager at Octo (a consulting company; LinkedIn): Olivier has been an active participant in the Slack and has written one article (here; in French). He has also helped to popularize data mesh within Octo and France in general.

Barr Moses – Co-Founder & CEO at Monte Carlo Data (LinkedIn; Twitter): Barr has written multiple articles about data mesh and its ties to other key trends in the data management space.
We also recommend following her colleague Molly Vorwerck (LinkedIn), who leads content for Monte Carlo and shares great content from other sources.

Scott Hirleman – Host of Data Mesh Radio / Friendly Research Spider at DataStax (LinkedIn; Podcast): Scott is the host of Data Mesh Radio, currently the only podcast exclusively dedicated to talking about data mesh. He co-founded the Data Mesh Learning community and drove it for the first 1.5+ years.

This is a short initial list. If we missed anyone, please let us know: info@datameshlearning.com