In my professional life, I’m a software engineer, hacker, and author. I enjoy working in small teams, usually startups, those driven to provide value to their customers. I work at Hortonworks on the Apache HBase team. You can stalk my recent work activities on the Apache JIRA. I think the community that can develop around open source is a fascinating, empowering construct. I had a hand in starting Seattle’s Scalability meetup a few years back.

I’m also a programming languages aficionado; I particularly enjoy the simple elegance inspired by the lisp family of languages. You might even find me lurking at a Seajure meetup every once in a while. I think maps are beautiful and the information retrieval challenges associated with GIS data are fascinating. It is through this lens that I have come to work with other scientific data sets. I think the promise of “Big Data” lies more in scientific research than ad analytics. As with the data and Clojure communities, Seattle has CUGOS, a vibrant open source GIS meetup.

Outside of work, I enjoy music, photography, and travel. Occasionally I post snaps of either of the above on Flickr.

I had the honor of writing HBase in Action with my friend and colleague Amandeep Khurana. We concluded the work last year and the book is now in wide distribution, both as print and ebook. HBase in Action is intended to be the unofficial user’s guide for Apache HBase. We enjoyed the help of many fine members of the HBase community. All of the source code used in the book is available on the HBase In Action github account. Hopefully it’s useful to you as you start your journey with this technology.