This installment of “Meet the Project Founder” features Apache Bigtop founder and PMC Chair/VP Roman Shaposhnik.

What led you to your project idea(s)?

Conceptually, Apache Bigtop can actually be traced as far back as me working at Sun Microsystems in 2007-2008. I was assisting the team responsible for coming up with a 100% community-driven, open source Solaris distribution that could also be used as a basis for an enterprise-grade commercial product offering (which eventually became OpenSolaris). I then joined Yahoo! Inc. as a manager of a small team of extremely talented engineers tasked with integration efforts around Yahoo’s internal cloud offering based on Hadoop. Our project was called HIT (Hadoop Integration Testing) and we were known as “HIT-men”.

In this installment, meet Cloudera Software Engineer Mark Grover (@mark_grover).

What do you do at Cloudera and in which Apache project are you involved?
I’m a Software Engineer at Cloudera, involved mostly with Apache Bigtop, an open source project aimed at building a community around packaging and interoperability testing of projects in the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. In addition, I contribute to Apache Hive, a data warehousing system built on top of Apache Hadoop that allows users to structure and query their Hadoop data using familiar SQL-like syntax. I have also written a section in O’Reilly’s book on Hive, Programming Hive.

In this installment of “Meet the Instructor,” we speak to San Francisco-based Glynn Durham, one of the big brains behind Cloudera’s Introduction to Data Science training and certification. 

What is your role at Cloudera?
I am a Senior Instructor with Cloudera University, which means I am a road warrior: I will travel anywhere to teach anything to anyone. I teach all the courses Cloudera offers, including custom private training events that I run at customer sites. Right now, I’m especially enjoying teaching Cloudera’s new course, Introduction to Data Science: Building Recommender Systems. In tandem with the rollout of the course, we’re developing Cloudera Certified Professional: Data Scientist exams, which will include a challenging performance-based lab component in addition to the written test.

Prior to Cloudera, I primarily came from a database background. My first corporate job was at Oracle just before it went public. I spent a year producing Oracle’s first batch of course materials for developers and database administrators and then spent several years teaching all kinds of people all over the world. For some time, I was an Oracle Database Administrator. I eventually moved on to the LAMP code stack, and I later worked for MySQL.

In this installment of “Meet the Engineer”, get to know Customer Operations Engineering Manager/Apache Sqoop committer Kathleen Ting (@kate_ting).

What do you do at Cloudera, and in what open-source projects are you involved?
I’m a support manager at Cloudera, and an Apache Sqoop committer and PMC member. I also contribute to the Apache Flume and Apache ZooKeeper mailing lists and organize and present at meetups, as well as speak at conferences, about those projects.

My role is a hybrid “player/coach” model: in addition to doing managerial things like leading a team and addressing customer escalations, I also answer customer support cases directly, which is a fairly unique combination. This is an effective approach: giving me direct insights into customer concerns that I otherwise wouldn’t get, helping me stay grounded, and ensuring I appreciate the work the team is doing, first-hand.

The Hadoop Community is an invariably fascinating world.  After all, as Clouderan ATM put it in a past blog post, the user group meetups are adorably called “HUGs.” Just as the Cloudera blog has introduced you to some of the engineers, projects, and applications that serve as the head, heart, and hands of the Hadoop Community, we’re proud to add the circulatory system (to extend the metaphor), made up of Cloudera’s expert trainers and curriculum developers who bring Hadoop to new practitioners around the world every week.

Welcome to the first installment of our “Meet the Instructor” series, in which we briefly introduce you to some of the individuals endeavoring to teach Hadoop far and wide. Today, we speak to Jesse Anderson (@jessetanderson)! 

What is your role at Cloudera?
I joined Cloudera about a year ago as a curriculum developer and instructor. I get the best of both worlds in educational services: I create and improve existing curriculum, such as the Cloudera Manager series, and I travel to teach the courses.

In this installment of “Meet the Engineer”, meet Marcel Kornacker, the architect of the Cloudera Impala open-source real-time query engine for Apache Hadoop.

What do you do at Cloudera?

In this installment of “Meet the Engineer”, meet Nong Li, a software engineer working on the open-source Cloudera Impala real-time query engine.

What do you do at Cloudera?

I’ve been working at Cloudera for a little over a year now and for the whole time, I’ve been working on Cloudera Impala. On Impala, I spend most of my time focusing on improving the performance of the query execution engine, working on the IO subsystem, JIT-compiling portions of the query execution, and working on expression evaluation and other performance-centric components.

In this installment of “Meet the Engineer”, meet Eva Andreasson (@EvaAndreasson), a former Java programmer currently working with Cloudera engineers as the product manager for CDH.

What do you do at Cloudera?

In this installment of “Meet the Engineers”, meet Todd Lipcon (@tlipcon), PMC member/committer for the Hadoop, HBase, and Thrift projects.

What do you do at Cloudera, and in which Apache project are you involved?

In this installment of “Meet the Engineers”, meet Jonathan Natkins,  also known as “Natty” by his friends and colleagues. 

What do you do at Cloudera, and in which Apache project are you involved?

For the last year and a half, I’ve been an engineer on the Enterprise team. We’re the guys who build Cloudera Manager, and all the goodies that make it easy to manage and administer Apache Hadoop clusters. Specifically, I’ve worked on a number of things across the product, like scale and performance for the databases underlying the various monitoring tools available in the Enterprise edition of Cloudera Manager. I’ve also worked extensively on our operational reporting and HDFS file search capabilities. While I don’t work full-time on any of the Apache projects, I have been known to contribute to Apache Hive and Hadoop on rainy days.