This podcast episode explores the journey of Paul Dix, the founder and CTO of InfluxData, and his development of InfluxDB, an open source time series database. The episode discusses the design goals and constraints of InfluxDB 3.0, the motivations behind the redesign of InfluxDB 2.0, the challenges of building a fully executable database engine, the benefits of building a data platform on open source components, the integration of InfluxDB 3 with Amazon query services, the advantages of adopting open source platform pieces for startups, the challenges of building a data system using data processing libraries, the potential of Rust in big data processing, the landscape of columnar serialization formats, and the future of data processing. Overall, the episode highlights the importance of open source development and the potential for innovation in the data processing space.