High Performance Spark

Holden Karau is transgender Canadian, and an active open source contributor. When not in San Francisco working as a software development engineer at IBM's Spark Technology Center, Holden talks internationally on Apache Spark and holds office hours at coffee shops at home and abroad. She is a Spark committer with frequent contributions, specializing in PySpark and Machine Learning. Prior to IBM she worked on a variety of distributed, search, and classification problems at Alpine, Databricks, Google, Foursquare, and Amazon. She graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor of Mathematics in Computer Science. Outside of software she enjoys playing with fire, welding, scooters, poutine, and dancing. Rachel Warren is a data scientist and software engineer at Alpine Data Labs, where she uses Spark to address real world data processing challenges. She has experience working as an analyst both in industry and academia. She graduated with a degree in Computer Science from Wesleyan University in Connecticut.