Building Zingg: From Identity Resolution Challenge to a Thriving Open Source Community

I started working on identity resolution while setting up analytics for a client. To be able to identify that there is one single real world entity represented by the varying records from different systems seemed easy at first, but extremely hard no matter what I tried. The more I worked on it, the more challenges I became aware of and it became a thrill ride of problem solving for me. I got completely immersed and stopped taking other consulting work to focus on building a generic solution. When I showed my early version to my friend and mentor Joydeep Sen Sarma, creator of Apache Hive, he encouraged me to open source it. As an active consumer of amazing open source technologies, it was a great way to contribute back. So I latched on to the idea. I was convinced there were more people like me, but it was not clear if they would find me. Fast forward to today. The Zingg open source community is 700 members strong today. Turns out what felt like an esoteric problem to me is a strongly felt pain for enterprises. The validation of the problem and Zingg’s approach has resonated with data folks. Zingg has come a long way from where it started! From a single person, we are now a founding team that cares deeply about entity resolution. Thank you to all our community members, well wishers and supporters. You have made this journey well worth it!