Hello, I'm David Stockton, and I'm thrilled to be joining Directus as VP of Engineering.
I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself, share a bit about my journey, and explain why I'm so excited about what we're building here.
But first, a bit of history.
How I got here
My earliest memory of computers is playing Motor Mania on the Commodore 64, typically arguing with my older sisters about who won or is playing next.
I'd have been about 6 and have no idea why we had one - it mostly sat in a cupboard. I mention it only because it's also the first device I ever programmed on.
I can't be certain, but I'm reasonably sure my first computer program was this BASIC code:
10 PRINT "My sisters smell!"
20 GOTO 10From then, I knew I wanted to work with computers when I grew up (or be a policeman - hey, I was only 6!)
In the 1990's, I discovered modems, BBSs and the early days of the internet even introduced me to this thing called Linux. I still couldn't shake the BASIC coding background though and by now had received my first income from selling Visual Basic code - though I'm pretty sure it wasn't:
Module Hello
Sub Main()
MsgBox("My sisters smell!")
End Sub
End ModuleOver the next 20–25 years, I picked up a degree in Software Engineering and spent time engineering both for fun (personal projects) and for profit (corporate life).
My career followed a fairly traditional path: senior individual contributor, then - over the last ~10 years - primarily as an engineering leader.
Prior to joining Directus, I was Director of Cloud Infrastructure Engineering for Confluent - the Kafka people, not the Wiki people! - responsible for globally distributed teams managing over 5,000 k8s clusters and over 100,000 VMs spread across AWS, GCP and Azure.
Additionally, I was EMEA R&D Engineering Site Lead which was essentially advocating and influencing without authority for the entire EMEA team.
Why join Directus?
It's a little cliché'd but the top reason was the team.
I like to think of myself as a people-first leader and surround myself with amazing people I want to both work with and learn from - and ideally contribute from some of my experience along the way too.
Ben, Rijk and the entire Executive Leadership Team were all smart, personable and held a strong vision for company growth.
The pain points they self-identified were all areas I felt I had significant experience and could contribute solutions with creativity - and hopefully have a lot of fun along the journey!
In short, it felt like a perfect match. It felt like the kind of place I'd have regretted not saying yes to.
The opportunity ahead
There is no doubt AI is changing both the software industry and the wider world.
Having spent a significant time working in regulated industries such as investment banking and consumer finance - and even less-regulated industries, one thing is for sure - there will always need to be a capability for strong "checks & balances".
Directus - and our expanding product-line - is extremely well positioned to win in this space. Our dynamic schema management and secure, multi-protocol, API-first approach enable exactly what AI-first builders need - it democratises data securely.
Or more plainly, it can safely unlock both professional and vibe-coded solutions on top of your dispersed data sources.
So that's me. I'm here, I'm excited, and I'm ready to get to work. If you see me around, say hello - I'm always happy to chat!
Written with love (and spell-check), not AI, from the North West of England.