Holden Karau is a transgender Canadian open source developer advocate at Google focusing on Apache Spark, Beam, and related big data tools. Previously, she worked at IBM, Alpine, Databricks, Google (yes, this is her second time), Foursquare, and Amazon.

Holden is the coauthor of Learning Spark, High Performance Spark, and another Spark book that’s a bit more out of date. She is a committer on the Apache Spark, SystemML, and Mahout projects. When not in San Francisco, Holden speaks internationally about different big data technologies (mostly Spark). She was tricked into the world of big data while trying to improve search and recommendation systems and has long since forgotten her original goal.

LGBTQ, LGBT Awareness Month, LGBTQ Voices Personal Growth, Technology, Information Technology, Science and Technology Professionals, Google, Big Data, Databases & Infrastructure, Data, Data Analytics, Authors, Computer Science, Transgender,