About Me
I grew up in Hartford, Connecticut — son of a Guatemalan mother and a Puerto Rican father — and came to technology by an unusual route. I spend my time now on the open data lakehouse: Apache Iceberg, open catalogs, and where analytics meets agentic AI. Mostly I like taking something that looks intimidating and making it click for the person in front of me.
From Economics to Engineering
For over a decade in New York City I taught economics and finance to working professionals at Greico Financial Training — standing in front of a room every day figuring out how to make dense material land. In 2019 I moved into software full-time, first as a full-stack developer and then teaching at the General Assembly bootcamp.
These days I lead developer relations at Dremio, where I work on Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris and spend most of my week helping engineers get their hands dirty with the lakehouse. You'll also find me on stage at conferences like Data Council, Data Day Texas, Confluent Current, and DataEngBytes.
Published Books
I've written or co-written more than 35 books across tech, economics, and fiction. A few that engineers reach for most:
- Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide: Co-authored — one of the first full books on the format.
- Apache Polaris: The Definitive Guide: A working guide to open catalog federation.
- Architecting an Apache Iceberg Lakehouse: How to build multi-engine lakehouses that hold up in production.
- Lakehouse for Everyone: A plain-English on-ramp to the open data lakehouse.
- Agentic Analytics: What changes when AI agents start doing the analysis.
You can explore my complete library of works at books.alexmerced.com.
Technical Focus
My technical research and writings focus on:
- Open Table Formats: Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Apache Hudi.
- Agentic Architecture: The Model Context Protocol (MCP), Semantic Layers, and LLM Orchestration.
- Distributed Query Engines: Dremio, Trino, Apache Spark, and Apache DataFusion.
- Metadata Federation: Apache Polaris, REST Catalogs, and Apache Gravitino.
How this site is written
Everything here comes out of hands-on work — building on this stuff, teaching it, and writing about it. I test the code and the architectures against how these systems actually behave in production, and I'd rather flag a caveat than oversell a pattern.