Patrick McFadin has been a distributed systems hacker since he first plugged a modem into his Atari computer. Looking for adventure, he joined the US Navy, working on the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS), which cemented his love of distributed systems. He then spent the 1990s working on infrastructure as the internet started to take off and barely survived the ensuing dot-com crash. Along the way, Patrick picked up a Computer Engineering degree from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and has been focusing on high-scale internet infrastructure ever since. His latest obsession is distributed data systems, and he has been a steady contributor to the Apache Cassandra project since 2011.
