Office Hour with Tom White, Ryan Blue (Cloudera), and Joey Echeverria (Scaling Data)

Tom White is one of the foremost experts on Hadoop. He has been an Apache Hadoop committer since February 2007, and is a member of the Apache Software Foundation. His book Hadoop: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly) is recognized as the leading reference on the subject. In 2011, Whirr, the project he founded to run Hadoop and other distributed systems in the cloud, became a top-level Apache project.

Tom is a software engineer at Cloudera, where he has worked since its foundation, on the core distributions from Cloudera and Apache. Previously he was an independent Hadoop consultant, working with companies to set up, use, and extend Hadoop. He has written numerous articles for O’Reilly, java.net and IBM’s developerWorks, and has spoken at several conferences, most recently at ApacheCon and OSCON in 2011. Tom has a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge and a Master’s in Philosophy of Science from the University of Leeds, UK.

Joey Echeverria is the director of engineering at Rocana, where he builds applications for scaling IT operations built on the Apache Hadoop platform. Joey is a committer on the Kite SDK, an Apache-licensed data API for the Hadoop ecosystem. Joey was previously a software engineer at Cloudera, where contributed to several ASF projects including Apache Flume, Apache Sqoop, Apache Hadoop, and Apache HBase. Joey is also a coauthor of Hadoop Security, published by O’Reilly.

Ryan Blue is a software engineer at Cloudera, currently working on the Kite SDK team.