Aaron Morton has been working with software for over 17 years. In 2011 he left a position at the VFX company Weta Digital in Wellington to pursue his interests in Cassandra. Since then he's been helping clients around the world get the best out of Cassandra. While contributing to the project and the community through involvement in the user list and IRC channels, and code contributions.

At Weta Digital he piloted the use of Cassandra to provide database services that could stand up to the render farm of 35,000 cores. The key concern at Weta was how to design a scalable persistence layer they could maintain availability in the face of hardware failure and errant clients.

Prior to Weta he worked on large E-Commerce projects in London and created a Content Management System for the National BBC Radio stations.

Aaron frequently speaks at meetups and conferences such as the DataStax Cassandra Summits and the Apache Software Foundation's ApacheCon. He runs the Data Driven Wellington meetup group to encourage local engineers to explore new technology. Aaron is also a committer for Apache Cassandra and was voted a DataStax MVP for Apache Cassandra by the community.

Cristen has been managing technology projects and companies for over a decade. A one-time developer and perpetual project manager, she brings her tenacity for details and order to managing the operations of The Last Pickle.

Most recently, Cristen managed a global team to implement enterprise-level DHIS 2 database projects for BAO Systems. Prior to that, she spent seven years in consulting with clients to managing projects and teams implementing Drupal content management systems.

Over her years as a consultant, Cristen has helped numerous companies fine-tune their methods and processes to work more efficiently and effectively, build successful teams, and deliver successful projects for clients.

Mick designs, builds, and is an evangelist for distributed systems, from data-driven backends using Cassandra, Hadoop, Spark, to enterprise Microservices platforms.

Prior to TLP he spent seven years at FINN.no building a microservices platform, along with introducing data-driven solutions and architecture based on Cassandra, going back to Cassandra 0.7. Mick has become an advocate for change towards microservices built upon modern data-driven practices that introduce eventually consistent highly available solutions using Apache technologies like Cassandra, Hadoop, Spark, and Kafka.

Mick has always had a keen involvement in open source code, contributing to codebases along the way. He is an Apache Member, an Apache Cassandra committer, the PMC Chair for Apache Tiles, as well as being a DataStax MVP for Apache Cassandra since 2014.

Alain has been working with Apache Cassandra since version 0.8. He was the first Engineer at teads.tv which had grown to 400+ employees by the time he left.

During his time at Teads Alain managed and scaled Cassandra clusters across multiple AWS Regions. His experience with Cassandra from the early days has included upgrading hardware, growing capacity, upgrading, and tuning all the time maintaining Availability. He also evolved data models to take advantage of the latest features and performance as Cassandra improved.

Alain frequently contributes to the Apache Cassandra users mailing list.

Alexander has been working as a software developer since 1998, mainly for Chronopost, the french leader of express shipments. He's been leading there the effort to build a Cassandra based architecture and migrate critical services to it from traditional RDBMS. During his time at Chronopost, Alexander helped designing a wide range of systems including billing, delivery truck tracking, proactive delivery delay detection, and push tracking.

He is involved in the Cassandra community through the development of a JDBC wrapper for the Datastax Java Driver.

Alexander has been speaking at tech events like Cassandra Summit, Devoxx France, Big data Paris and the Paris Cassandra Meetup.

He co-hosts a french podcast on Big Data technologies called "Big Data Hebdo" and has been selected as Datastax MVP for Apache Cassandra since 2015.

Jon Haddad has 15 years experience in both development and operations. For the last 11 years, he's worked at various startups in southern California. In a past life, he put Cassandra in production and co-wrote cqlengine, the Python object mapper for CQL. After 2 years as an evangelist at DataStax, he is now Principal Consultant at The Last Pickle, helping customers of all size succeed with Apache Cassandra.

Joaquin Casares started as the ninth employee in an office of 10 supporting Fortune 500 companies using Cassandra 0.6.8 on his 3rd day as a Support Engineer at DataStax in January 2011. Over the next two years he provided firsthand support to 200+ organizations, including 15 of the Fortune 100. Joaquin helped resolve issues, develop proof of concepts, and provide technical guidance through public forums, IRC, mailing lists, and Meetups.

He then dived into a Software Engineer in Test role as he split his time developing java-driver and python-driver regression harnesses, contributing to DataStax' internal cluster testing tool, building community demos, and shipping enterprise tools. After more than a year and a half, Joaquin trained 3 new QA Engineers as he made his way to work alongside the Presales SWAT Team to develop self-contained multi-node demos that could easily be launched by Inside Sales Teams. In this role he experimented with Vagrant, Docker, Spark, Solr, and different data models on EC2, Azure, and Intel NUCs. On his last day, DataStax had grown to 440 geo-distributed employees.

After, Joaquin joined Umbel in an effort to overhaul a 5-year Django project as part of a three-person team focused specifically on Architecture. Over the course of his time at Umbel, he helped reduce workloads to 30% of their original run times while using 50% fewer workers using asynchronous design which Cassandra excels at. Joaquin also became a firm believer of volatility-based decomposition while architecting a data access layer built with Microservice, Event Driven Design, Time Series, and CQRS principles to transparently handle denormalization, client-side retries, metrics, ORM-like hydration, and journaled writes.

Anthony joined TLP because he loves helping people understand and use Cassandra successfully. He started his software engineering career, spanning 13 years, by working for Canon Information Systems Research Australia (CiSRA) where he represented Canon on the W3C Working Group and developed an internal distributed testing system.

After 7 years at CiSRA he went to work for RoZetta Technology (child company of Sirca) to pursue his interests in web technologies and distributed systems. There he lead a number of projects relating to highly available distributed systems. Notably, he lead a project which successfully replaced a MySQL database with a Cassandra cluster in a production system that stores historical trade data.

Ever since he started working with Cassandra in 2014, Anthony has been involved in the Cassandra community. He has helped to grow and is a co-organiser of the Sydney Cassandra Users Meetup group.

Nahum is actively involved in supporting and growing the Ruby community in New Zealand, running the Wellington Rails meetup since 2006 and running all three Wellington Rails Camps including the first ever in New Zealand. He served as a founding member of the Ruby New Zealand committee.

He is a sought after Ruby developer and CTO working in Wellington for the past 11 years growing teams and building award winning products. He has an interest in the start-up scene and always has an idea or two he's trying out.

Marvin has 11 years' experience in IT, mainly as a Java Engineer. Originally from Brazil, he's recently chosen Wellington, the coolest little capital in the world, as the place to call home.

During his time in Brazil, he worked for several startups, most notably at ContaAzul - an online booking system and Sonatype - the company behind many Maven related products, most notably Maven Central.

Amanda Skuldt has nearly a decade of experience managing information technology, research, and intelligence projects. She is a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and leverages both Agile and PMI-based project management best practices and processes for the success of her teams.

Prior to TLP, Amanda spent six years as an analyst, simulation supervisor, and project manager for Wikistrat where she managed large-scale crowdsourced analytic projects for government and private sector clients. She has a strong focus on leadership and development and brings a passion for continuous process improvement, team empowerment, and problem-solving to The Last Pickle.

Radovan has over 4 years of experience with Cassandra and the surrounding ecosystem. Most of his experience comes from his time at Spotify, where he was involved in maintaining their sizable Cassandra fleet since its early beginnings. In addition to Cassandra operations work, Radovan was involved in the development of tools automating some of the more cumbersome operations like repairs, backup and recovery, as well as big batch data transfers. Some of these tools were open-sourced so Radovan got to share them with the community through speaking at several conferences, including Cassandra Summits. Radovan has been elected Datastax MVP for Apache Cassandra since 2016.