About

Hello! I am Dieter Plaetinck.
Yes, that’s the correct spelling. Many people struggle with my name. Sorry.

My interest for computers started in my teens, overclocking CPU’s, tweaking RAID arrays, building awful websites and somehow getting Linux working (poorly).

For 15 years I pursued a career in site reliability and high performance data systems. First at Netlog, a large social network in Europe, which was a tremendous learning experience, put to an end by Facebook. Spent a few years doing consultancy and then academic research into information retrieval (search engines & machine learning). Learned a lot. Mainly about institutional dysfunction.

In 2012 I seized the opportunity to leave Belgium and move to New York City to work at Vimeo. I built upload, transcoding and storage systems and enjoyed the weekly Staff Picks videos screenings. I developed an interest in analytics and monitoring systems, and a desire to not live in New York City anymore.

I joined Grafana Labs as founding engineer. Built a metrics system, a team to build the metrics system, and then worked on 2 more metrics systems to replace the first one. Tried to get information to flow a little better, did some marketing, some sales, some support. Learned that it’s all rewarding if you can work with the right people and have good executive leadership (or possibly the best, in this case). Suffered through many hiring decisions, but in the end it was all worth it because they’ve done amazing things, not in the least, replacing everything I’ve built.

Grafana is a fantastic company that has opened many new doors for me. Empowering, transparant, work-from-anywhere, open source, supportive & great people. After 8 years, I took a sabbatical, realized I wanted to do something completely new, and rejoined to help incubate and build the Oncall mobile app

Since then, I’ve left Grafana to:

  • try to support open source startups, via OSS Capital or directly.
  • start working on an open source self improvement app, Tapas

Outside of computers, I love mountain biking and skiing. I used to be pretty good on drums and now I’m trying to learn piano.