Alex Holmes

Alex Holmes (born 1974) is a software engineer at Verisign, and a technology author and blogger. Alex started working with Hadoop in 2008 on a web-crawl and analytics platform at Verisign. As he started working with Hadoop in production environments he had to figure out how to solve problems such as moving data in and out of Hadoop, using compression without destroying data locality, performing advanced joining techniques and so on. These items didn’t have a lot of coverage in existing Hadoop books, and that’s really the idea behind Alex's book, Hadoop in Practice (Manning 2012) – it’s a collection of real-world recipes learned the hard way over the years.

Alex has also been a presenter at JavaOne and Jazoon.