About

Hello! I am Dieter Plaetinck.
Yes, that’s the correct spelling. It’s a weird 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).

My interests in site reliability and high performance data systems led me to work at Netlog, a large social network in Europe during the web2.0 revolution, a tremendous learning experience put to an end by Facebook. Spent a few years doing open source consulting 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, and lots of random stuff. 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. Empowering, transparant, work-from-anywhere, open source, supportive & great people. After a sabbatical, I rejoined to help incubate and build Grafana’s incident response Oncall mobile app

Since then, I’ve left Grafana to:

  • support open source startups, via Consulting & Advisory and investing in cool companies via different Open Source venture funds or directly.
  • work on an open source fitness project, Body.build

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.